Hospice Support Care in Lyme, CT
Non-medical hospice support — homemaker-companion services that complement hospice nursing during a parent's final months at home.
No sales pressure. We'll tell you straight if we're not a fit.
You got a call from the hospice nurse on a Tuesday afternoon, while you were parked near the boat launch on Hamburg Cove, trying to hold it together before driving back to your parents’ house on the old back road off Route 156. The nurse was kind, professional, and explained everything clearly. But the moment she hung up, you realized you couldn’t be there every hour, and you couldn’t leave work every time your father needed a familiar face beside him. That gap, the hours between hospice visits, the nights when your family needs someone calm and steady in the room, is exactly where we come in.
Hospice support care means a trained aide is present in the home during the hours your hospice nurse cannot be, which is most hours of the day. We handle personal comfort: repositioning, light hygiene, keeping the room calm and quiet, and making sure your family member is never alone unless they want to be. We follow the hospice team’s lead and stay in our lane, which means no clinical decisions and no overlap with what the nurse owns.
Day to day, that looks like sitting with someone through a restless afternoon, helping with a sip of water or a change of position, answering the door so a family member can sleep, or simply being a warm and steady presence in the room. For families in Lyme, many of whom live on quiet roads where neighbors are not close by, having someone physically there around the clock can change how the entire last chapter feels. After a transition home from Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, the first few days are especially uncertain, and we can often start care within hours of that discharge call.
Families in all areas of Lyme typically need someone to carry the overnight hours so adult children can rest, someone who can manage the small physical tasks without panicking, and someone the person dying actually feels comfortable with. That last part is not small. We spend real time on the match. Because Private Duty Aides was founded by a working nurse, our team understands the clinical rhythm of hospice care and how to support it without disrupting it.
Nurse-founded, and it shows. Private Duty Aides was started by a working nurse who saw firsthand how families navigating end-of-life care at home got left without support between clinical visits. That origin shapes every hire we make and every care plan we build.
Matched for this work specifically. Not every good aide is right for hospice support. We select and brief caregivers for this kind of care, which means they know how to be present without being intrusive, and how to support family members who are grieving in real time.
We stay reachable. When something changes during hospice care, and it will, you need to reach a real person quickly. We answer. We don’t route you to a call center or make you leave a message and wait.
We know New London County. We understand the discharge process at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, the geography of Lyme, and the particular challenges families here face when getting care in place quickly on rural roads far from town services.
How it works
Why families choose us
Every aide is trained and supervised through an RN’s lens — not just placed and forgotten.
Personality fit matters more than skill on paper. We match for temperament, pace, and patience.
No franchise rotation. You work with the people who run this agency — direct, accessible, accountable.
Most families are matched with a caregiver within 24 to 48 hours. When something shifts at home, we move quickly.
We build a daily structure around your parent’s rhythm — meals, walks, evenings — and protect it.
You hear from us, not just the aide. Updates on appetite, sleep, mood, mobility — the things that matter.
Every caregiver clears a multi-step screening — background check, reference checks, and an in-person interview with our RN founder — before they're ever placed in a home.
Why families trust us
Private Duty Aides is nurse-founded. Every caregiver clears a multi-step screening — a background check, reference checks, and an in-person interview with our RN founder — before they are ever placed in a home. You get the same consistent caregiver, matched by a nurse, not whoever happens to be available.
Common questions
On a typical day, a hospice support aide handles physical comfort tasks like repositioning, light hygiene, and keeping the environment calm and quiet. They sit with your family member during long stretches when no one else is there, manage the door and small household needs so family can rest, and stay alert to changes in condition that they can report to the hospice nurse. They don't perform clinical care, but they do everything that makes the hours between nurse visits feel safe and attended to. The goal is that nobody is ever alone who doesn't want to be.
We can often start same day if a family in Lyme calls us while the discharge is being processed. Post-discharge from Lawrence + Memorial is one of the most vulnerable windows in hospice care, and we take that seriously. If you call in the morning, we aim to have someone at the house by that evening. We won't make you navigate a week-long onboarding process when the timeline is urgent.
Our services are private pay, which means Medicare and most standard insurance plans don't cover what we provide. Some long-term care insurance policies do include benefits for this type of non-medical support, so it's worth checking your policy or calling us to talk through it. We're upfront about costs from the first conversation, no surprises.
A home health aide typically follows a clinical plan of care ordered by a physician and may perform certain medically-oriented tasks. Hospice support care focuses on comfort, presence, and relief for the family during end-of-life care at home. We don't administer medications, manage medical equipment, or make clinical decisions. What we do is stay present, keep things calm, and handle the personal and practical needs that fall outside what the hospice nurse covers on their visits.
Yes, and for hospice support we treat the match as one of the most important parts of getting care right. We ask real questions about your parent's temperament, what makes them comfortable, what unsettles them, and what they valued in the people around them. A caregiver who is a good fit for a quiet, private person is very different from one who's right for someone who wants company and conversation. We take the time to get that right, and if the first match isn't working, we adjust.
We cover it. You won't be left scrambling to figure out a backup on a day when everything else is already hard. We keep someone briefed on your family's situation so any coverage isn't starting from zero. We also tell you in advance when we know a change is coming, rather than letting you find out the morning of. Reliability during hospice care is something we think about constantly, because the stakes of a gap are too high.
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Hospice Care near Lyme
No sales pressure. We'll tell you straight if we're not a fit.
Private Duty Aides — Lyme, CT
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