MF Family Home Care provides personal care on Cape Cod — help with bathing, dressing, grooming and moving safely around the house.
Each household needs a different mix. Below is what this looks like in practice.
Safely, at the person's pace, with as much privacy preserved as the situation allows.
Including the things that carry more weight than they seem — shaving, hair, a shirt with buttons rather than a hospital gown.
Handled matter-of-factly, without commentary, which is the whole skill.
Getting out of bed, into a chair, to the bathroom and back. This is where falls happen, and where a trained pair of hands matters most.
Not medical treatment — the daily attention that keeps small problems from becoming large ones.
when eating has become difficult.
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.
With personal care, continuity is not a preference. A person who accepts help from someone they know will refuse the identical help from a stranger, and be right to.
We staff for consistency deliberately, and we introduce slowly — frequently starting with a task that has nothing to do with the bathroom, and letting the relationship come first. Families sometimes read that as slow. It is the fastest route that actually works.
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.
That is normal and it is where most families start. We usually begin with something else entirely — meals, laundry, company — and let the personal care follow once your mother knows the person. Pushing produces a refusal that is then harder to undo.
Yes. Personal care is hands-on help with daily living. It is not nursing, and we do not provide wound care, injections or IV therapy.
A morning routine frequently runs an hour to ninety minutes. Many families book that daily, or several mornings a week.
Tell us during the home visit. Safe transfers depend on technique and sometimes on equipment, and it is far better to plan for it than to discover it on the first morning.
Usually within a few days. We answer the phone at night and on weekends, because these decisions are rarely made during business hours.
