Personal Care Services: What Every Family Should Know

This is a broad term covering a specific, well-defined category of support. Here's the complete picture — what it includes, who provides it, and what it costs.

What Personal Care Services Actually Include

Bathing, dressing, grooming, and toileting assistance — the daily hygiene and self-care tasks that become difficult with age, illness, or mobility limitations. Personal care also typically includes mobility support, transfers, and help with the physical routine of daily living, handled with dignity and respect for the person's independence wherever it's still possible.

What Personal Care Services Don't Include

This is the key distinction: personal care is non-medical. It doesn't include skilled nursing tasks — wound care, medication administration, injections, or clinical monitoring. Those require a licensed nurse and fall under home health, a different category with different eligibility rules and different costs.

Who Provides Personal Care Services

Non-medical home care agencies, like ours, employ trained Care Professionals specifically for this work. No nursing license is required for personal care itself, which is part of why it's more accessible and more affordable than skilled home health.

What Personal Care Services Cost

Because personal care doesn't require a nursing license, it's priced significantly lower than skilled home health or private duty nursing. Our own investment runs $25 to $42 an hour, depending on the specific level of support and schedule — a genuinely different, more accessible price point than clinical care.

Personal Care vs. Medicare-Covered Home Health

Medicare's home health benefit covers skilled nursing and therapy under narrow eligibility (homebound status, a physician-certified skilled need) — it generally doesn't cover personal care alone, without an accompanying skilled medical need. This surprises a lot of families who assume Medicare covers all in-home support. We've written a detailed explanation of this distinction.

Who Actually Needs Personal Care Services

An aging parent who's safe living independently but needs help with daily hygiene and mobility. Someone recovering from an illness or surgery who doesn't require skilled nursing. A person with dementia needing supervision alongside personal care support. Personal care services scale to fit a wide range of situations, from a few hours a week to full live-in coverage.

How to Get Started

A good agency will talk through your specific situation, assess the actual daily routine, and match a Care Professional to your family's needs — not apply a generic package regardless of what's actually needed.

How Interim Provides Personal Care Services

We're a non-medical home care agency built specifically around this kind of support, coordinating alongside any skilled medical or hospice team a family already has rather than replacing it.

Our 7th Week Guarantee

No long contracts. If you don't feel the difference after six weeks of care at 20 or more hours a week, your seventh week is free.

Get Started

Call us at (801) 401-3515 to talk through what kind of support actually fits your family's situation.

Learn more about what non-medical home care includes, what caregivers actually do day to day, and our in-home care services.