Home Care and Caregiver Bonding

Different types of home care provide different features. Certain features, such as bonding can be very important for some consumers, and not so important for others. This article is an attempt to clarify when bonding can help you, and when these features may cost you more than what you get out of it.
Caregiver bonding helps provide assurance that if your caregiver steals anything from your house, you can be compensated. But this is not always a simple matter. If you suspect that a caregiver has stolen from you, generally you must press charges in order to receive compensation for the item. For relatively small dollar value items, clients are often hesitant to do this because of the effort involved with complying with law enforcement. Instead they choose to simply discontinue service with the caregiver, and the bonding that the client has been paying for never comes into effect. For higher dollar value items however, bonding can be useful. Another situation where bonding can be useful occurs if a caregiver is hired to pay bills for a client. If a law-breaking caregiver with access to the client’s checkbook were to start writing checks to himself, bonding can ensure that all funds are recovered.
So as a general rule, bonding becomes more useful with the more access a caregiver has to valuable items. So if a client has expensive paintings on the walls, or gives the caregiver access to personal funds, such as through a checkbook, bonding can be worth the expense. But in other situations, this feature might be of a lower priority, and not worth the extra cost.