A home health aide provides crucial support and helps ensure a patient can remain at home and independent for as long as possible. Duties range from monitoring the patient's condition to assisting with bathing, dressing, and grooming, as well as helping with light housekeeping. If you're considering a career as a home health aide, learn more about some of the important qualities these professionals need to succeed.

What Are the Qualities of a Successful Home Health Aide?

1. Care

Home health aides have compassion for others. They have a genuine interest in helping their patients and developing meaningful relationships with each one. They can listen, actively and attentively, to their patients' concerns and empathize with their patients' struggles.

They are ready to respond to their patients' needs, find workable solutions to challenges, and provide comfort and reassurance when things get emotional or stressful.

2. Communication

Communication is key to a healthy aide-patient relationship. The home health aide must have top-notch interpersonal communication skills so they can effectively relay information to the patient and address the patient's needs. They also need to know how to speak to others in the patient's life so that the entire care team—which may include family members, doctors, nurses, and other home healthcare workers—can stay on the same page.

The aide will need to read and write fluently, take thorough notes, be proficient in email and cellphone use, and retain current information about a patient's health.

3. Flexibility

A career as a home health aide is not like a typical nine-to-five job with the same duties day in and day out. For this reason, flexibility is crucial. You may be required to work hours outside of the standard workday, including nights.

Responsibilities will differ from one shift to the next; a patient that requires help with personal hygiene may be followed by a patient who needs assistance communicating with healthcare providers. Without much notice, the aide must be open, willing, and ready to change tracks and tackle head-on the precise needs of the current patient in the present moment.

If you have these qualities and want to put them to work for you, enroll in home health aide classes at IGBANS Institute of Vocational Training. Located in Springfield Gardens, NY, their training can help you begin your new healthcare career. From home health aide and CNA programs to EKG and phlebotomy technician classes, they offer the education you need to help yourself and others thrive. Call (718) 276-8100 to sign up for their next session.