Family & Nursing Care Select – A Home Care Agency That Advocates on Your Behalf

Family & Nursing Care Select is a home care agency that employs rigorously-screened and highly-qualified Caregivers to provide home care to older adults.

Upon starting care, a Supervisory Nurse will meet with you to assess the client’s needs and create a Plan of Care. Clients and their families enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing there is a Registered Nurse (RN) overseeing the care, checking in regularly, and making any adjustments needed.

Experience the benefits and comfort of Family & Nursing Care Select

  • Our home care agency is focused on compassionate and reliable in-home care.
  • Our nurse oversight is welcomed by adult children who find the extra reassurance comforting or are not able to check in on their loved ones regularly because they live too far away or their schedule will not allow it.
  • Each Select Caregiver, as an employee, receives ongoing supervision and training specific to the health conditions and individual needs of each client. Each Caregiver is also covered by the company’s professional liability and worker’s compensation insurance.
  • Caregivers are paid by Family & Nursing Care Select.
  • Client invoices are sent and payable every other week.
  • As an added service to clients with Long-Term Care Insurance, Family & Nursing Care Select help clients and their families better understand the benefits offered by their policy and helps them file the requisite paperwork for
    reimbursement (see more information below).
  • Our Caregivers receive overtime pay when working 40+ hours/week. Unlike many other agencies, we don’t pass this cost on to you. We absorb that cost so that clients experience the many benefits realized from superior continuity of care with greater consistency of Caregivers.

Flexible Commitments to Meet Everyone’s Unique Needs

Many people aren’t aware of the flexible nature of home care. Care can be arranged for just a few hours a day up to 24 hours a day. There is no long-term obligation.

We recognize that every family’s needs are different and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. People who try home care experience such positive changes in their life and in the life of their loved one that they often choose to receive services long term. We work together with you to find a solution for your unique family situation.

A Home Care Agency that Advocates on Your Behalf

While services from a private duty home care company like Family & Nursing Care (both Family & Nursing Care Classic and Family & Nursing Care Select options) are not eligible for reimbursement from Medicare, Medicaid, or general health insurance, most Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) policies reimburse their policyholders for these private duty services.

LTCI policies reimburse policyholders either a daily, weekly, or monthly maximum amount for home care to assist them with activities of daily living. Some policies will also have a benefit for home care if your loved one is diagnosed with a cognitive impairment, and needs dementia or Alzheimer’s care.

As an added service to our clients who have LTCI, Family & Nursing Care Select helps you better understand the benefits offered by your policy and helps you file the requisite paperwork for reimbursement. We first have a conference call between the Long-Term Care Insurance carrier and our Family & Nursing Care Select Long Term Care Manager to support you in getting a full understanding of the criteria, benefits, and next steps to a successful and smooth experience with the claims reimbursement process.

Family & Nursing Care Select can also assist you with getting reimbursements from your LTCI carrier for the cost of our Services by submitting the necessary claim documentation to your LTCI company.

Our specialized support allows us to advocate on your behalf.

We believe it is our job to ease your mind and present solutions to your challenges—not cause you more paperwork and aggravation.

 In need of home care services? Contact us to get started!

We’re Ringing in 2022 with a Win!

Best of Bethesda 2022Happy New Year 2022!  We hope you had a wonderful holiday season.

Here at Family & Nursing Care, we are ringing in 2022 by celebrating being voted “Best In-Home Health Care Provider” in Bethesda Magazine’s Best of Bethesda Readers’ Poll!

Every year, local feature and lifestyle publication, Bethesda Magazine, enlists its readers to vote on the best of the best in the Bethesda area. The program accepts only write-in votes to identify local companies that its readers believe provide premium service to their customers and community while helping make the Bethesda area a great place to live, work, and play.

This is our 7th time winning the “Best In-Home Care Provider” crown, having had previous wins from 2013-2019, and making the list as a Top Vote Getter in 2020 and 2021. We are humbled and honored to receive this distinction as it’s public recognition like this that enables us to reach out and provide support to even more clients.

At Family & Nursing Care we work tirelessly to fulfill our mission to enhance the lives of older adults in our region. We continuously seek to innovate and find ways to improve the client experience and exceed clients’ expectations.  Being voted “Best of Bethesda” honors that work and gives us the confidence to keep moving forward in making a difference in someone’s life every day.

We thank the clients, Caregivers, and professionals with whom we are privileged to interact, for placing their trust in us and allowing us to continue our valuable work.

Industry Insights from Family & Nursing Care’s CEO, Neal Kursban

Neal Kursban HeadshotFamily & Nursing Care CEO, Neal Kursban, is a well-respected industry leader and is regularly sought out to share his wisdom and insider industry know-how with others. Recently, Home Health Care News (HHCN), the leading source for news and information covering the home health industry, featured Neal and/or Family & Nursing Care in the following pieces:

Neal serves as a member of the Private Duty Home Care at NAHC Advisory Board, and he was recently invited by NAHC as a webinar panelist where he joined with other industry leaders as well as legal experts for an open conversation about vaccine mandates and the impact they could have and are already having on the home care industry. Neal said, “I think it’s a no-brainer that clients want vaccinated caregivers … and as a business person, when they ask for that I want to find a way to get to yes.” Neal also shared that nearly all caregivers currently working with Family & Nursing Care have already been vaccinated.

Meet Emily Smith – A Client Services Manager Who Makes Caring for Older Adults a Family Affair

Emily Smith HeadshotEmily Smith’s life centers around family. At home, Emily and her husband, Tom Smith, who is also a valued team member here at Family & Nursing Care, enjoy attending their three young children’s extracurricular activities and watching movies as a family. Emily’s dedication to family extends to her professional life, too. She works alongside her sister-in-law Kelly Ann Sharp, our wonderful Director of Client Services, to support our client’s, families, and professional’s needs. Emily cares for her clients and their families like her own, always keeping their best interests at heart.

Emily holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Salisbury University and a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Maryland. While earning her degrees, she worked as a GNA at a local Nursing Center for four years and also interned at an Adult Day Care facility.

Emily has been in her role as Client Services Manager since April 2013 when, after eight years of loyal service to foster children, she returned to her roots and true passion of working with and supporting older adults. Her excellent communication skills, responsiveness, and conscientious nature ensure the best customer service possible and build rapport with our clients she serves.

Meet Lea Picard, “Picture Perfect” Client Services Manager

Lea Picard HeadshotWe like to describe Lea Picard as “picture-perfect”. Not only does she dabble in photography as a hobby, she also perfectly represents our guiding values of honoring, empowering, and supporting clients and their families in every possible way. She’s worked as a Client Services Manager at Family & Nursing Care for over two years, playing an important role in the company’s expansion goals: working with clients, professionals, and families in the Howard County region as we expand services to meet the needs of those in the area. Lea is also the Client Services Manager for the Seabury care management group, helping to assist their clients with private duty home care needs.

Lea loves forming meaningful connections with clients, which is why her favorite part of her job is going on home visits to clients. Always ready, willing, and able to lend a helping hand, Lea volunteered her time during COVID-19 in 2020 to assist in preparing and distributing much needed PPE packages to Caregivers.

Next month, Lea will be volunteering her time once again to help someone in the Family & Nursing Care family – she’ll be working as the photographer at a co-worker’s wedding!

Taking Care of Others by Meeting Personal Wellness Goals

Give Hero and Family & Nursing Care LogosWith a dedicated staff whose daily work activities revolve around being responsive to the needs of clients and their families, caregivers, and professionals, the Human Resources team at Family & Nursing Care puts a special focus on making sure the staff themselves have opportunities to attend to their own personal wellness.

Over time, HR has introduced programs to meet these needs, like making baskets of healthy fruit available in the office, ordering in a salad bar for lunch once a week, and providing discounts on gym memberships.  As COVID-19 took hold in 2020, some of these initiatives became displaced while more of the staff began to work from home.

With the staff needing to put forth even more effort to attend to the needs of others and attention to personal health and wellness becoming even more important during this time, the HR team deliberated on how to motivate the staff to continue meeting personal wellness goals.  Then they found GivHero.

GivHero is an app that offers an innovative solution to support workplace wellness and social causes. Through the GivHero app, staff can compete in wellness challenges and easily track their progress toward meeting the challenge goals through syncing their smartphone, watch, or other tracking device to the app, or through manual entry.  The reward for meeting the goal is a donation from the company to one of a number of social causes or charities selected by the staff member themselves.  Along the way, staff can check up on co-workers’ progress and offer support to coworkers toward meeting their goals, or even engage in some good-natured competition.

For the initial GivHero challenge, a goal was set for Family & Nursing Care staff to take 5,000 steps a day for one month. Family & Nursing Care donated $1 per participant to the charitable cause of the staff member’s choice for every day that the goal was met.  Over 30 participants stepped their way to donating $564 to charity and enjoyed some friendly encouragement and competition along the way.  Over the course of the month, 5,260,363 collective steps were taken by Family & Nursing Care staff members.  Enough steps to walk from the Silver Spring office all the way to Los Angeles!

As she works to put together the next challenge, HR Manager Gabriela Marr is quite happy with the results GivHero has already provided.  “With an entire staff who innately have that giving spirit, what better way to motivate them to focus on their own health and wellness than by offering them a chance to give back while doing it,” she said.

A Spirit of Giving: The Family & Nursing Care Foundation

Puzzle piece with a hand holding a heartAt Family & Nursing Care, our mission of care extends to the community through the Family & Nursing Care Foundation, which offers grants to help lower-income older adults gain access to the home care they need and provides scholarships for students to receive Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) training to care for the aging population.

We are so grateful to those who have contributed to the Family & Nursing Care Foundation, which operates as a fund of the Greater Washington Community Foundation. It is because of these donations that this year we were able to grant:

  • $20,000 to Home Care Partners
  • $20,000 to Community Reach of Montgomery County
  • $20,000 to the Jewish Social Service Agency (JSSA)

In addition, the Family & Nursing Care Foundation has established a scholarship fund at Montgomery College to support students pursuing their Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) license. Through a partnership with the college, the Foundation has established a $50,000 scholarship. Ten-Thousand dollars is awarded each year over a five-year period to selected CNA candidates applying for financial assistance.

It is very rewarding to see our grants provide low-income seniors with peace of mind through devoted home care and help build and enhance the careers of future CNAs. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to support these incredible organizations.

Improving the quality of life for low-income seniors is the reason our Founder, Sandy Kursban, started the Family & Nursing Care Foundation. Every gift to the Foundation is personally matched by Sandy, dollar for dollar. If you are interested in donating, please click here for more information.

Partnership in Practice: The Impact of Support in the First 48 Hours Post Hospital Discharge

Hospital emergency drop off signRecognizing a real need for post hospital discharge support for older adult patients, Family & Nursing Care and Suburban Hospital partnered on a pilot program to evaluate the impact of a free shift of home care during the first 48 hours after hospital discharge. The goal was to evaluate the impact on readmissions to the hospital, as well as to break down the barriers of home care to those resistant to having care at home.

Mitch Markowitz, Vice President, Business Development at Family & Nursing Care and Margie Hackett, Transition Guide Nurse Manager at Suburban Hospital will be co-presenting on their learnings from the pilot program at the upcoming Lifespan Network Annual Conference and Expo in Ocean City, Maryland.

September 28th – October 1st, join them at the conference to hear more about the overall program and its results, including pivotal information on how the outcomes of the pilot group differed from those that declined service.

Based on their findings, Mitch and Margie will present a best practice for maximizing conversations about home care prior to hospital discharge and help audience members understand the real gaps between discharge and the start of Medicare Home Health services.

Click here to learn more and register for the conference.

Summer is Over, but the Thermometer Keeps Rising

COVID Vaccination thermometerOur efforts to get Caregivers vaccinated against COVID-19

Each week during our full staff stand-up meeting, we discuss the metrics that are most important to our business. In January 2021, we added a new metric – one that has grabbed everyone’s attention because it is related to the safety and well-being of Caregivers, clients and their loved ones. This metric is a thermometer that tracks how many Caregivers we’ve collected COVID-19 vaccine records from.

When COVID-19 vaccines became available across the country earlier this year, we knew we had our work cut out for us with our goal to get every one of the over 1,300 Caregivers affiliated with Family & Nursing Care vaccinated. We also knew that we simply could not stop short of our goal because the stakes were too high. So, we strategized, planned, organized, strategized even more, implemented our plan and revised our strategy along the way to keep up with the changing landscape of vaccine availability.

How we did it:

We communicated. We emailed and texted about the importance of the COVID-19 vaccination, the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, and the requests from clients and Senior Living Communities to only work with vaccinated Caregivers. We put together a video of interviews with several Caregivers who were early adopters of the vaccine, to convince their peers to get vaccinated as well.  We increased the frequency of our Caregiver communications with most of the topics emphasizing the vital importance of getting vaccinated.

We incentivized. At our Caregiver Appreciation Event in June, we held a special raffle with multiple $250 and $100 gift cards for Caregivers who had submitted a vaccine record.

We reached out. In 2020, we hired a team of full-time employees whose sole responsibilities were dedicated to reaching out to Caregivers to stay on top of their need for regular COVID-19 testing.  We asked this team to add Caregiver vaccine outreach to their list of duties. These team members call Caregivers daily to talk with them individually about getting vaccinated, educate those apprehensive to get vaccinated, help them find places to get the vaccine, and follow up with them to make sure they get both their first and second doses (where applicable). Our Caregiver Coordinating and Caregiver Services departments also spent extensive time talking one-on-one with Caregivers about the importance of getting vaccinated.

With these combined efforts, we’ve made great strides in reaching our goal to get every Caregiver vaccinated. While we haven’t accomplished our goal just yet, the finish line is very much within sight.

With over 1200 Caregivers now vaccinated, our staff recently took some time to reflect on our efforts. “What do you think helped us get this many Caregivers vaccinated?” asked President, Jeff Zukerman. The answers came in rapid succession. “Communication!” “The raffle!” “Personal outreach!” “The video!”. Neal Kursban, our CEO, added, “It’s a combination of all our efforts.  The enormous commitment and investment of time is our moral imperative to keep doing everything we can to keep clients and Caregivers as safe as possible. Thank you to everyone who has played a role in our success here at Family & Nursing Care.”