St. Charles Home Health Care Team

At St. Charles, you'll get a team of certified experts with many years of experience that care for you in your own home. Skilled nurses, certified home health aides, therapists and medical social workers work closely with you, your family and referring physician to ensure that your plan of care is precisely administered with personal attention.

Skilled Nursing

We help patients with chronic and short-term disease by providing 24-hour access to registered nurses who are highly skilled in the administration of home health care. Our nurses work directly with the hospital to develop and administer a plan of care for in-home treatment and monitoring as prescribed by the physician. 

Our skilled nursing services include:

• Development of a plan of care 
• Ongoing consultation with your physician
• Intravenous (IV) therapy
• Tele-monitoring
• Medication management
• Pain management
• Certified wound and ostomy care (WOCN)
• Collection and delivery of lab specimens
• Education for you and your family on managing your health

Tele-monitoring

Our state-of-the-art tele-monitoring services allow us to remotely monitor chronic disease patients in their homes. Tele-monitoring helps prevent unnecessary hospitalization by enabling faster follow-up and intervention. It also helps our home health care patients feel safer, more comfortable and empowered to manage their own health care.

Everyday, patients use our tele-monitoring devices to take their own vital signs measurements as prescribed by their physician, such as weight, blood pressure, pulse, glucose level, blood oxygen level, and/or ECG rhythm.

Besides taking their own health measurement, patients can also answer questions sent by their care manager, which may include general health assessment questions and/or targeted follow-up questions, and enter self-reported data as directed. The information is then automatically transmitted through an ordinary phone line via modem to our Clinical Review Software, which allows us to track, store data and generate reports. The combination of objective data and subjective responses enables the clinician to make more timely care decisions and helps prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.
For more information about tele-monitoring, please visit the Association of Telemedicine.

Medication Monitoring

Through medication monitoring, we can help ensure that medications are being taken as ordered by the physician. Taking medications correctly as prescribed supports the healing of the patient. We work with the patient and the patient's family to manage the patient's medication and medication regimen at home, providing a key element to the physician's care of the patient.
Our medication monitoring services help:

• Decrease unsafe drug interactions, adverse effects and non-compliance
• Patient and/or caregivers to understand medication administration as ordered

Certified Home Health Aides

Our certified home health aides provide a variety of personal care services for patients of all ages, including assistance with:

• Bathing and grooming
• Dressing
• Incontinence care
• Blood glucose testing
• Vital signs (blood pressure, pulse and respirations)
• Transfer of patients such as from bed to chair
• Oral suction
• Foley catheter care
• Ostomy care
• Walking, exercise and strengthening programs

Medical Social Work

Medical social work helps individuals, couples and families cope with the social, psychological, cultural and medical issues resulting from an illness.

Our medical social services include working with the patient and the patient's family to:

• Identify and refer to community resources
• Find specialty services for stroke, cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer's
• Assist terminally ill patients
• Get individual and family counseling
• Assist in discharge planning
• Determine if they qualify for medical assistance
• Assist with alternative funding sources
• Give hospice referrals when appropriate

Nutrition Counseling

Nutrition counseling is provided by a registered dietician who works with the patient and the patient's family to customize a diet plan according to the individual's plan of care as prescribed by the physician. No other agency in Central Oregon offers this type of care by a registered dietician who clinically administers, monitors and adjusts a patients nutritional guidelines for the treatment of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, stroke and other disease conditions.