That care can include anything from cooking and cleaning to help with bathing, getting dressed or taking medications. Getting help with those things can prevent the elderly from trying to do too much and ending up losing their balance and falling.
There is a trend for people in general good health to stay in their homes longer and receive care there and getting a little care can help people stay healthier. But that kind of in-home assistance for the elderly during the day can be expensive.
According to a national survey by The MetLife Mature Market Institute released Tuesday, the average national daily rate for adult day services is $64, up $3 per day or 5 percent from 2007.
People in the Montgomery, Alabama area pay a lot less than that, an average of $27 daily, while residents in the state of Vermont pay the most, $141 daily.
The survey found that the national average hourly rate for home health aides is $20, a $1 or 5 percent increase from 2007. And the national average hourly homemaker-companion rate is unchanged from last year at $18.
Those rates are highest in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota at $28 an hour for home health aides and Rochester, Minnesota at $26 per hour for homemaker/companions. While residents of the Shreveport, Louisiana area pay the least for those services at $12 per hour for each.
In keeping with southern states having the lowest in-home care rates, elderly residents of the Memphis, Tennessee area also enjoy rates that are below state and national averages.
In the Memphis area, the average adult care rate was $33 an hour, well below the national average of $64, and in the rest of Tennessee that rate was $56 per hour, still below the national average.
With the cost of home health aides, Memphis still beat the national rate at $17 per hour, but the state rate was the same as the $20 per hour national rate.
Memphis also beat the national average hourly homemaker-companion rate at $15 an hour, versus $18 an hour nationally, and $17 statewide.
The annual national survey was done by the MetLife Mature Market Institute, which is staffed by gerontologists and is part of the research, knowledge management, education, and policy support arm of the company for its corporate customers and business partners.
