Golden Heart Senior Care Review

Golden Heart Home Care Review

As people become older, they may find they need assistance with the day-to-day activities that independence requires. Some people choose to fill this need by going into an assisted living facility or a similar arrangement. But these days more and more seniors are choosing to age in place—stay in their homes as long as possible, and have caregivers come to them to provide the help they need. Home care agencies specialize in helping seniors maintain their independence at home, and Golden Heart Senior Care, a franchised company with two dozen locations around the country, has a solid track record of providing these types of home care services. Golden Heart also offers a number of other helpful services, including helping seniors find quality housing when they’re ready to move out of their home.

Company Background

Golden Heart Senior Care was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Frisco, Texas. Since beginning to expand through franchising in 2010, it has grown to around 25 locations, making it one of the smallest national home care companies in the US. Despite its size, Golden Heart boasts an intensive focus on high quality home care, and consumer reviews (see below) suggest that they’ve done a good job. At the same time, however, the company’s franchises get relatively low marks from their employees on employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, with some of the lowest employee ratings among home care companies we reviewed. What’s more, only a third of employees on Glassdoor said that they’d recommend the company to their peers, suggesting that some franchises could have trouble retaining caregivers.

Services and Offerings

Companion Care

As noted above, Golden Heart Senior Care offers a full range of home care services, and its companion care services include meal preparation, “deep cleaning” of the household, help with grooming and hygiene, transportation, and social support, along with other offerings. The company also offers respite care for family caregivers who need a break.

Specialized Care

Golden Heart also offers help for seniors with more complex care needs, including those with Alzheimer’s and other neurological impairments, chronic diseases such as arthritis, COPD, and MS, and a variety of other serious conditions, making them a good choice for those needing higher level care at home.

Golden Heart Home Safe

This program involves Golden Heart employees coming into the home, making an assessment of the safety risks there, and—if they’re providing care—making an action plan to eliminate common threats to safety in the home by incorporating home safety interventions into the plan of care. The Home Safe program also provides advice on overall safety practices, and can help with installation of medical alert systems.

Household Management Assistance

Many home care agencies offer organizational help, but Golden Heart offers a full range of services aimed at helping seniors stay on top of all the complexities of managing a household. Golden Heart caregivers can help with bill paying, periodic and seasonal tasks, inventory control for food and medicine, pet care, and organizing social events and celebrations.

Senior Advocacy

Golden Heart also offers a unique approach to helping seniors succeed in areas beyond the home. Their senior advocacy program provides accompaniment to medical appointments and close coordination with medical providers. In addition, they will also provide lifestyle support by helping clients socialize, and look out for signs of confidence scams and senior abuse.

Senior Housing Consultation

For those who have decided to move out of their homes into assisted living or other senior housing arrangements, Golden Heart provides a needs assessment and can advise on the best local housing options, going so far as to tour facilities with clients and follow up to make sure the living arrangements are satisfactory. Since Golden Heart receives payment for this service from their pre-screened housing providers, their consultations are offered free of charge.

Word on the Street

In our survey of online feedback, we take care to get reviews from as wide a range of locations as possible. That said, we should note that Golden Heart has relatively few locations compared to some of their competitors, making it difficult to get as many reviews of their services as we normally would. Among the online reviews we sampled, however, Golden Care got relatively high marks for their home care services, giving them a weighted rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars.

Consistent Praise for Service

Almost all reviewers, regardless of the forum they appeared on, praised Golden Heart’s caregivers for the service they provided, with many reviewers mentioning caregivers by name, and many reviewers drawing favorable comparisons with other companies they’d tried.

Solid Administration

Along the same lines, administrators came in for quite a bit of praise, with more positive mentions of administrators and owners than we saw for almost all the companies we surveyed.

Trust and Dependability

As you might expect, given the strong reviews of caregivers and administration, Golden Heart received consistent praise for providing trustworthy, reliable service, with caregivers and office staff getting high marks in particular for their willingness to keep in touch with clients and their families.

Cost

No single franchise location can characterize a company’s rates, and that’s why we take pains to survey locations from a number of different areas, and then compare their rates with the rates charged by their local competition as reported in the Genworth Cost of Care study. Based on our survey, Golden Heart comes in at about the middle of the pack among home care companies, with its rates right in line with the local median. There is, however, one way that Golden Heart stands out: the company does not require a minimum number of hours for a caretaker visit, so if you’re looking for help with a shorter than usual list of tasks, you may want to see if Golden Heart serves your area.

The Bottom Line

There are many home care agencies offering quality care for seniors, but a few stand out for providing care in a way that addresses the needs of isolated clients. Golden Heart Senior Care focuses on delivering meaningful, personalized, quality care across the full spectrum of companion care and personal care services, but also offers senior advocacy services and household management assistance that can give remote family and friends peace of mind about a client who lives alone. Finally, for those looking to transition out of the home, Golden Heart provides senior housing consultation, making its franchises a solid (and well-reviewed) choice for clients at a remove from those who care about them, and for families hoping to improve the lives of their loved ones despite the challenges of distance.