If you are reading this at 11 p.m. after a phone call from the hospital, you are in the right place.
It looks like a person your parent knows by name, arriving at the same time, doing the ordinary things that have quietly become hard.
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.
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.
Light housekeeping, laundry, grocery shopping, and meals cooked in the kitchen your mother has cooked in for forty years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simple, and quietly the difference between a stable month and an emergency room visit.
One call, a free visit at home, and a written plan you can change. Most families begin smaller than they expect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We answer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
The questions families ask us most, answered plainly.
Often within a few days, and sometimes sooner. We answer the phone at any hour, including nights and weekends, because hospital discharges do not wait for Monday.
We build schedules around what the household needs rather than a fixed block. Tell us the hours that are hard and we will tell you honestly whether we can cover them.
Yes, and most families do. Care that starts at eight hours a week frequently grows, and after a recovery it often shrinks again. Neither direction is a problem.
We accept long-term care insurance, and policies frequently cover exactly this kind of care. Some veterans and surviving spouses also qualify for VA benefits that help pay for it. We are not a Medicare provider. Bring us your policy or your VA paperwork and we will go through it with you.
Often not, at first. This is the most common thing families worry about, and it is usually solved by starting small — a couple of hours, one task, the same person every time. Trust is built by repetition, not by persuasion.
We cover the shift. A schedule that only works when one person is healthy is not a schedule.
