UPMC Home Healthcare Services

At UPMC Home Healthcare, our specially trained registered nurses and wound-ostomy certified nurses have over 25 years of experience in wound and ostomy care.

Our nurses are certified in:

• WoundVac management
• Anodyne therapy
• Digital photography

Palliative care is medical care that:

• Focuses on treating the pain, symptoms, and stress that can accompany serious illness.
• Supports other treatments you're receiving by helping you live comfortably throughout your illness.

Palliative care can help a person at any stage of a serious illness. It is best introduced early in the plan of treatment.

You might consider palliative care from Great Lakes Home Healthcare if you:

• Are suffering from symptoms that are hard to treat such as pain, nausea, fatigue, depression, or anxiety.
• Need help understanding treatment choices.
• Want support with making difficult medical decisions.
• Need assistance coordinating treatments from different doctors.

When it comes to the care of you and your newborn, experience matters!

At UPMC Home Healthcare, we take great pride in bringing you some of the most experienced nurses in:

• Labor and delivery
• Postpartum care
• Nursery
• Neonatal intensive care
• Gynecology

Collectively, our nurses have over 40 years of home care experience and an additional 136 years of nursing expertise in maternal child health. This is the experience you want and need when it comes to caring for you and your baby.

Home health care services for women and children

Giving birth can be overwhelming, with many questions to follow. Our maternal child health program is designed to answer those questions and meet the needs of women and their children at home.

Maternal child services include:

• Prenatal care for high-risk pregnancies
• Welcome home care for early hospital discharge
• Postpartum care (for both mother and baby)

Some indications for pediatric home health services include:

• Failure to thrive
• Cancer care
• Tracheostomy and tube feeding management
• Wound and burn care
• Diabetes education and care
• Conditions requiring physical, occupational, or speech therapy

Other at-home health care services for women include:

• Post-surgical wound care
• PICC lines and antibiotic therapy
• Pessary management
• Bladder function assessments

Prenatal and postpartum assessments

Our complete prenatal assessments for mothers-to-be include:

• Environmental readiness
• How to identify the symptoms of labor
• Teaching and assessment of the complications of labor
• Management of gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, hyperemesis, and pre-term labor
• Assessment of fetal heart tones
• IV hydration and more

Complete postpartum assessments for mothers and children include:

• Breast feeding follow-up and feeding concerns
• Basic infant care, such as bathing
• Umbilical cord and circumcision care
• Vital signs monitoring
• Jaundice treatment
• Blood work
• Bradycardia follow-up (apnea monitoring)
• Community resource referral

Our therapists at UPMC Home Healthcare have a broad range of expertise and qualifications.

Comprehensive rehabilitation services include:

• Physical therapy
• Occupational therapy
• Speech therapy

Our goal is to help patients return to their optimal function after illness, injury, or surgery.

Physical therapists at UPMC Home Healthcare can provide the following services at your home:

• Specialized post-op rehab programs for knee, hip, and spinal surgeries
• Pain assessment and treatment
• Gait strengthening and balance training
• Transfer and stair training
• Post CVA rehabilitation
• Energy conservation
• Neuropathy treatment
• Lymphedema treatment
• Home safety evaluations
• Equipment training and evaluation

Occupational therapists from UPMC Home Healthcare offer the following in-home services:

• Upper extremity strength training and hand therapy
• Balance and endurance training
• Assistance in wheelchair fitting and with adaptive equipment
• Help regaining independence in bathing, dressing, feeding, and self-care
• Visual deficit training and safety evaluation
• Community reintegration
• Cognition
• Patient and family education
• Energy conservation

Speech therapists from UPMC Home Healthcare can provide the following services at your home:

• Speech articulation
• Swallowing difficulties
• Therapeutic exercises
• Cognitive function
• Auditory/visual comprehension
• Verbal and graphic expression

Home health aide services are available at UPMC Home Healthcare to provide personal care and assist with:

• Dressing
• Bathing
• Grooming
• Transfers and feeding

Home health aids provide care under the supervision and guidance of a registered nurse.

To help pull everything together, UPMC Home Healthcare has a medical social worker available to assess and improve our patients' emotional adjustment.

Through counseling, as well as referral to outside community resources and agencies, our social worker helps patients and families adjust to issues resulting from an illness or injury.