Personal Care in Old Lyme, CT
Hands-on help with bathing, dressing, grooming, and daily personal hygiene for seniors.
No sales pressure. We'll tell you straight if we're not a fit.
You flew in to see your father for the holidays and noticed, when he stood up from the dinner table, that he gripped the back of the chair with both hands and held his breath. He caught you watching and made a joke. He always makes a joke. But the drive home along Route 156 kept replaying it in your mind, because you knew that moment had been happening for a while before you happened to see it.
That’s usually what brings families to us. Not a crisis, but a quiet accumulation of moments that finally land. Your father, or your mother, still knows exactly who they are. They just need some physical help, and asking for it feels like losing something. We understand that, and the way we work is built around it.
Personal care in Old Lyme, provided by aides who were matched to your family specifically, not just whoever was free that week.
Personal care is hands-on physical assistance with the tasks that require another person’s presence. That means bathing, dressing, grooming, toileting, and mobility support. It means being there when someone needs to move from the bed to the bathroom safely, or when getting dressed in the morning takes longer than it used to and takes more than two hands.
For families across Old Lyme, the most common situation is a parent who is physically limited but mentally sharp. They don’t need supervision. They need someone steady, someone who doesn’t make it a bigger deal than it has to be, and someone who respects their routine rather than replacing it. Personal care also includes help with meals, light housekeeping tied to daily function, medication reminders, and staying on top of the small things that keep a household running safely. After a discharge from Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, personal care can begin the same week, often the same day, to make sure the transition home goes the way the discharge planner hoped it would.
Because Private Duty Aides was founded by a working nurse, our approach to personal care is grounded in clinical understanding. Our founder knew exactly which physical care tasks go wrong when there’s no real training behind them, and she built our hiring and briefing process around that knowledge. Your parent’s dignity is not an add-on. It’s the starting point.
Nurse-founded, and it shows in this service.
Our founder spent years watching families struggle to find physical care that was both skilled and respectful. She started this agency specifically because of what she saw. Personal care is the service closest to that original mission, and it gets the most careful attention we have.
Our approach to personal care is specific, not general.
Before your caregiver arrives for the first time, they know your parent’s preferences, their physical limitations, their routine, and what not to do. That briefing is not casual. It’s detailed, and it comes from the conversation we had with you before we ever made a match.
We stay reachable when things change.
Personal care needs shift. A new medication changes mobility. A good week is followed by a harder one. When that happens, you need to reach an actual person who knows your family’s situation. That’s who answers when you call us.
We know Old Lyme and New London County.
We know the discharge process at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital. We know how Old Lyme families tend to think about home care, what they’re worried about, and what they need us to get right from the first visit. This is not a remote service. We’re local.
How it works
Tell us what’s going on. No intake forms, no pressure to commit, no referral process to wait on. We listen to what your family is dealing with and ask the questions that matter for personal care specifically, not a generic checklist.
For personal care, the match is everything. We consider your parent’s routine, their personality, what makes them comfortable, and what would make them shut the door. We don’t assign by availability. We think it through.
For most Old Lyme families, we can have care in place quickly. If your parent just came home from Lawrence + Memorial and needs help right away, tell us that. Urgent situations are something we plan for.
Once care begins, you’re not handed off. We check in, we ask how it’s going, and when something changes (because something always does eventually) we adjust. You call us and we answer.
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, personal care covers bathing or showering assistance, help with dressing and grooming, mobility support, and toileting. It also includes meal preparation, medication reminders, and light housekeeping tied to daily safety. The exact schedule depends on your parent's routine, which we learn before the first visit. The goal is to get through the morning, or the evening, or the full day with as little disruption to their normal life as possible.
We can typically have care in place within 48 hours, and for urgent post-discharge situations we often move faster. If you know the discharge date in advance, call us before your parent leaves the hospital. That gives us time to make the right match rather than a rushed one. Lawrence + Memorial's discharge team can also help coordinate timing with us directly if that's helpful.
Medicare does not cover non-medical personal care provided by a private agency, and most standard health insurance plans don't either. Long-term care insurance policies sometimes do, depending on the terms of the policy, so it's worth reviewing yours. We are a private-pay agency, which means families pay directly. We're straightforward about that from the first conversation so there are no surprises later.
A home health aide is a medical designation, typically associated with Medicare-covered skilled care ordered by a physician after a hospital stay. Personal care, as we provide it, is non-medical assistance with the physical tasks of daily life. Our aides are not performing clinical procedures, but they are trained, experienced, and work under the oversight of a nurse-founded agency that takes physical care seriously. For many families, personal care is exactly the right level of support without the clinical framework.
Yes, and for personal care that matching process matters more than almost anything else. We ask you detailed questions about your parent before we suggest anyone. We want to know their routine, their preferences, what bothers them, and what puts them at ease. We have placed enough caregivers with Old Lyme families to know that a technically capable aide who's the wrong fit for someone's personality will not last, and a smooth match makes everything easier for everyone.
We maintain backup coverage and we notify you as early as possible when a scheduling change comes up. We don't leave a gap and hope you figure it out. If a substitute is needed, we make sure they are briefed on your parent's care before they arrive, not handed a name and an address. Coverage continuity matters most in personal care, where the routine itself is part of what keeps things stable.
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Personal Care near Old Lyme
No sales pressure. We'll tell you straight if we're not a fit.
Private Duty Aides — Old Lyme, CT
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