Professional Caregiver Boundaries

In any caregiving situation, it’s important that the client and caregiver have a professional relationship. While it’s great when caregivers and clients can become friends, experience has shown that in all cases, professional boundaries should be maintained to avoid certain unfortunate situations. These unfortunate situations can occur whenever a caregiver exploits a close relationship with a client for personal gain.
One of these exploitative situations happens when a caregiver takes on a live-in assignment with a client, without having a primary residence. These situations can become especially troublesome if care is stopped for any reason, because the caregiver would then have no place to stay at all, and thus may be very apprehensive about leaving the residence. ACS prohibits this practice, and requires that live-in caregivers do not act as if they have moved in, for example, by leaving a lot of their things at the client’s residence.
A second exploitative situation can occur if caregivers attempt to manipulate clients into giving them gifts or money. We at ACS have heard horror stories about con-artist caregivers who develop unprofessional relationships with their elderly clients to help them obtain gifts, or even get written into the client’s will. To prevent anything like this from happening, ACS has a policy against large gifts between client and caregiver. Small gifts, like a client treating a caregiver to a meal are acceptable, but for items with higher dollar values, we highly discourage clients from offering them. If ACS finds out that a caregiver has accepted a large gift, we will notify those who are close with the client, such as family members or care managers, to make sure that they know about the situation. Because we discourage the acceptance of large gifts among our caregivers, we will also use this information to decide whether or not to place the caregiver with any future clients.
A third situation occurs when caregivers take clients’ resources for their own personal use. When doing grocery shopping for a client, a familiar scam that unethical caregivers might attempt, would be to purchase duplicate items, and then take half of the items for themselves. This is a way of hiding the theft by making it appear like a legitimate purchase. For this and other reasons, it can be very important for clients to not only demand that caregivers provide receipts for all purchases, but also to examine these receipts closely. Here at ACS we demand that our caregivers keep track of every penny spent, so there can be no doubt about what the money was used for. Here's some good advice for seniors seeking care: No matter how close you become with a caregiver, always be careful when that person uses your money. A good caregiver with nothing to hide will never have a problem with this.
ACS hopes that all of our clients become friends with their caregivers, but this does not mean that professional distance shouldn’t be maintained. The proper boundaries can prevent theft and exploitation, and do not discourage healthy and friendly caregiver/senior companionship.