Meridian At Home

My family recently dealt with this agency and it was a very bad experience. They do not screen their aides well and after assigning two unsuitable and poorly screened aides (one of whom was subcontracted from another agency and totally unknown to Meridian At Home), abandoned my family. It seems they are only in the business for the money. There are many other better choices for home care services in NJ, so avoid this agency at all costs.

Meridian at home employees nurses and home health that lack consistency in courtesy. Quite often you will find some nurses argumentative and condescending to the caregivers. When dealing with severely disabled and highly medicated patients, they tend to trust answers to their questions over the caregiver's experience or familiarity. HIPAA laws create communication barriers to effectively reaching the personnel by phone directly and their staff appears useless to provide alternatives in challenging situations like lack of adequate coverage of their own personnel or insurance. They often defer costs back to the caregiver for the lack of timely arrival of medical supplies, suggesting the caregiver pay out of pocket due to urgency.

Meridian At Home is a home health aide/senior care provider for the greater New Jersey Shore area. They provide hourly, daily and live-in workers. I have used Meridian in the past several times for an elderly relative. Meridian does the background checks and trains their own workers. You pay the company directly and they, in turn, pay the worker. Because they take a cut of the worker's pay on an ongoing basis, they are on the high side in terms of price. That being the case, it is often worth the money. First, their registered nurses provide a care plan for the workers to follow. Any time that a worker doesn't understand the care plan or has a problem, they have a supervisor to call. Most of the workers we dealt with were well trained and good with our patient. If they sent someone who was not up to the job, we could request another worker. Meridian also apparently has a large pool of employees to draw from. Whenever a worker was sick, they could almost always find a replacement in a short period of time. Would I use this agency again. Yes, I would. They were better than a few of the other agencies that I have dealt with. Some agencies do not train their own workers themselves, and the worker's skills vary greatly. While they are a bit expensive, they are a large agency with a large pool of employees. They can almost always find a good match for your patient.