If you are reading this at 11 p.m. after a phone call from the hospital, you are in the right place. MF Family Home Care provides home care in Massachusetts for older adults who need a hand at home — from a few hours a week to around the clock, every day of the year. We can talk today, and care can often begin within days.
It looks like a person your parent knows by name, arriving at the same time, doing the ordinary things that have quietly become hard.
That might be a caregiver who helps with a shower and gets your father dressed before his morning coffee. It might be someone who drives your mother to her cardiology appointment, remembers to bring the folder with her medication list, and calls you afterward so you are not guessing. It might be an overnight caregiver so your father can sleep in his own bed instead of a facility bed, and so you can sleep in yours.
We build the schedule around what is actually happening in the house. Some families start with four hours on a Tuesday and a Thursday. Some start with a live-in caregiver the day after a hospital discharge. Both are normal starting points.
Personal care. Bathing, dressing, grooming, help getting in and out of bed, walking safely from one room to another. The tasks that decide whether someone can stay at home.
Companionship. Conversation, a card game, a walk, someone who notices the mail is piling up. Isolation does real damage to older adults, and this is not a small service.
Homemaking. Light housekeeping, laundry, grocery shopping, and meals cooked in the kitchen your mother has cooked in for forty years.
24-hour and live-in care. For a parent who cannot safely be alone at any hour — after a fall, during a decline, or when the family has run out of room to cover the nights.
Respite care. For the daughter or son doing all of this alone. You are allowed to sleep, go to work, or leave town for a wedding. We cover the gap.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s support. Familiar routines, patient redirection, and a caregiver who does not argue with a memory that has changed. Staying in a known environment matters enormously here.
Coming home from the hospital. The first two weeks after a discharge are when people get readmitted. We help with the walking, the appointments, the meals, and keeping track of what the discharge papers actually said.
Medication reminders and meal preparation. Simple, and quietly the difference between a stable month and an emergency room visit.
This is the question that keeps people awake, and it deserves a straight answer.
Every caregiver we send is screened through a Massachusetts CORI background check before they ever enter a client’s home, and MF Family Home Care carries insurance covering the work our caregivers do in your home. Ask any agency for both — a family letting someone into the house unsupervised should not have to wonder.
We match caregivers to households deliberately — temperament, language, schedule, and the specific help needed — because a good match is what makes someone accept help at all. Our caregivers speak English, Portuguese and Spanish, which matters more than families expect: a parent who reverts to their first language as dementia advances does far better with someone who speaks it.
MF Family Home Care is owned by Marlene Plouf, a Certified Nurse Aide registered with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (CNA54796). That is a real credential with a number you can verify with the state. Most home care agencies in this region do not put an owner’s certification on the page, because there is nothing to put there. Ours is on the wall and on this page.
We provide non-medical home care. We do not perform skilled nursing, we do not run a hospice program, and we do not bill Medicare.
We tell you this on the first page rather than the tenth, because a family in a hurry can waste a week finding out. If your parent needs wound care, IV therapy, or a hospice team, you need a licensed home health agency, and we will say so on the phone instead of taking the case.
What we do is the part that fills the other twenty-three hours: the bathing, the meals, the company, the safety, the eyes in the house.
One call. Reach us at (781) 243-9736. We will ask what is happening, who lives in the house, and what a normal day looks like now compared with six months ago.
A conversation at home. We come to you, at no cost, and look at the practical things — the stairs, the bathroom, the kitchen, the hours when nobody is around.
A schedule you can change. We write a plan, you approve it, and we adjust it as things change. Care that made sense in March often does not in September, and that is expected.
There is no long-term contract required to begin.
Nobody publishes this, so families call five agencies to build a picture. Here is the honest range.
Across Massachusetts, in-home care generally runs between $35 and $46 an hour, with a statewide planning average around $38. On Cape Cod the number sits higher — in Barnstable, home care can reach $50 an hour. Companion care sits at the lower end of the range, personal care in the middle, and overnight or live-in schedules are quoted differently because the hours work differently.
Your actual number depends on how many hours you need, whether nights and weekends are involved, and how complex the care is. We will give you a real figure on the phone rather than a brochure.
We are based at 21 College Road in West Yarmouth and we serve families across the state.
On Cape Cod, that includes Barnstable, Hyannis, Yarmouth, Dennis, Falmouth, Sandwich, Mashpee, Harwich and Chatham. Off Cape, we serve Plymouth, Quincy, Brockton, Boston, Framingham, Needham, Lowell, Lynn, Lawrence, Haverhill, Worcester, Springfield and Fall River, along with the towns around them.
If your town is not on this list, call and ask. The answer is often yes.
We answer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the first conversation costs nothing.
