MF Family Home Care provides meal preparation for seniors on Cape Cod — real food, cooked in your parent’s own kitchen, to their own taste. It sounds like a small service. It is frequently the one that reverses a decline.
Each household needs a different mix. Below is what this looks like in practice.
Not delivered trays. The food they have eaten for fifty years, made the way they make it.
A caregiver who cooks a lunch usually leaves a dinner in the refrigerator with instructions on the lid.
With your parent when they are up to it, and on their behalf when they are not.
Company at the table is frequently what makes the meal get eaten at all.
A caregiver who cooks weekly notices the loss of appetite months before the family does.
— diabetic, low-sodium, soft foods, or whatever the physician has asked for.
One call, a free visit at home, and a written plan you can change. Most families begin smaller than they expect.
Tell us what is happening and what a normal day looks like now compared with six months ago.
We come to the house and look at the practical things — the stairs, the bathroom, the kitchen, the hours when nobody is around.
Most families begin smaller than they expect and adjust within the first month. No long-term contract is required to begin.
The difference between a meal service and meal preparation is whether anybody notices what happened to the food.
A delivered meal that goes into the refrigerator and comes out three days later untouched has solved nothing. Somebody has to be there, notice, and adjust — different food, smaller portions, a different hour, company at the table.
That is the actual service. The cooking is the easy part.
Every caregiver clears a Massachusetts CORI background check before entering 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 household letting someone in unsupervised should not have to wonder. We match caregivers to households deliberately — schedule, temperament, language and the specific help required — because a good match is what makes someone accept help at all.
MF Family Home Care is owned by Marlene Plouf, a Certified Nurse Aide registered with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health under CNA54796 — a credential with a number the state can verify. Very few agencies in this region put an owner’s certification in writing.
We provide non-medical home care. We do not perform skilled nursing, we do not operate a hospice program, and we do not bill Medicare.
If your parent needs wound care, IV therapy or a hospice team, you need a licensed home health agency, and we will tell you that on the phone rather than take the case and improvise.
Nobody publishes this, so families end up calling 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 near $38. Cape Cod sits above that — in Barnstable, home care can reach $50 an hour. The reason is supply: Barnstable County has one of the oldest populations in the country and a caregiver workforce squeezed by the seasonal housing market.
Companion hours sit at the lower end of the range, hands-on personal care in the middle. Overnight and live-in schedules are quoted differently from an hourly rate, because a caregiver who sleeps in the house is not billed like one working an active shift. Ask any agency to explain which one they are quoting before you compare two numbers, or you will be comparing figures that do not mean the same thing.
Your real number depends on how many hours you need, whether nights and weekends are involved, and how much hands-on help is required. We give a figure on the phone rather than a brochure.
The person receiving care is not the only one whose week changes.
Adult children stop driving over at lunchtime to check on something. The daughter who has been managing appointments, prescriptions and groceries from two towns away gets a report instead of a guess. The spouse who has been doing all of it alone gets to be a husband or a wife again rather than only a caregiver.
That shift matters as much as the practical help. Families who bring in support early tend to keep a parent at home for years longer than families who wait, because the arrangement stays survivable for everyone in it — not just for the person in the bed.
We serve families throughout Barnstable County, including Bourne, Sandwich, Falmouth, Mashpee, Barnstable, Hyannis, Yarmouth, West Yarmouth, Dennis, Harwich, Brewster, Chatham, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown — and across Massachusetts, including Boston, Worcester, Lowell, Framingham, Brockton and Plymouth.
Our office is at 21 College Road, West Yarmouth, MA 02673.
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.
Wherever it helps, yes. For an older adult living alone, company at the table is often what gets the food eaten.
Usually within a few days. We answer the phone at night and on weekends, because these decisions are rarely made during business hours.
