Caring for a parent or grandparent in Virginia means more than covering tasks. It means knowing someone is there at two in the morning, that the fall risk on the stairs has been thought about, and that your mother still gets to sit on her own porch in the spring. At Options Home Care, we help Virginia seniors stay in the home they have spent decades making theirs. Our live-in caregivers become a steady presence rather than a rotating one, and families across Northern Virginia, Richmond, Hampton Roads, the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest Virginia rely on that consistency.
As a Best of Senior Care recipient for 10 consecutive years, our team is trusted by families nationwide for compassionate, consistent in-home care.
Continuous, full-time care provides safety, comfort, and support at all hours of the day and night.
Fostering social connection and emotional support through conversation, shared activities, and joyful moments.
Facilitating safe movement around the home, including getting in and out of bed, chairs, and vehicles, making sure daily activities remain accessible.
Ensuring medications are taken as prescribed, with gentle reminders and health monitoring for peace of mind.
Helping with bathing, dressing, and routine tasks, so your loved one can maintain independence with dignity.
Providing assistance with basic housekeeping, laundry, and organization.
Meal planning and cooking so seniors enjoy fresh, balanced, and delicious meals customized to their dietary needs and preferences.
Transportation for doctor’s visits, social outings, and errands, helping your loved one stay active and engaged.
Help with grocery shopping, prescription pick-ups, mail drop-offs, and daily errands.
Home health care is clinical. A nurse or therapist comes to the house for skilled work such as wound care, injections, or physical and occupational therapy, usually for a limited stretch after a hospital stay, and it requires a physician’s order.
Home care is ongoing support for daily life. It covers the Activities of Daily Living: bathing, dressing, eating, toileting, transferring and continence.
At Options Home Care, we provide the hands-on part of everyday living. Bathing, dressing, mobility, meals, companionship, memory support and steady presence over months and years rather than a few weeks after a procedure.
What separates us from an agency that simply sends a body to an address is the structure behind the placement. We build a written care plan, coordinate discharge planning when your loved one comes home from a hospital stay, and provide daily personal care, live-in care and respite care as needs shift. Our AI-enhanced tools keep families informed even when they live several hours away, which matters in a state as spread out as Virginia.
We support the person, not just the diagnosis.
ADLs are the basic self-care tasks a person needs to manage in order to live independently:
They matter for more than describing need. Benefits programs use them as the eligibility gate. Most long-term care insurance policies require documented need with at least two ADLs before they will pay. Certain VA programs use three. Virginia’s Medicaid long-term care assessment also turns on functional need of this kind.
If your loved one is struggling with these tasks, we can help assess where they stand and walk you through what that means for coverage.
Live-in care means one dedicated caregiver lives in the home. They handle personal care, mobility, meals, companionship, medication reminders, housekeeping, errands and transportation through the day, and they sleep at night while remaining available if your loved one needs them.
24-hour round-the-clock care uses multiple caregivers rotating through shifts, coming and going across the day and night.
Live-in care with Options Home Care is genuinely one-on-one. Instead of a different face every eight hours, your loved one builds trust with one professional who learns how they take their coffee, which knee gives out first, and when something is off. For families in Virginia dealing with long distances between siblings, that continuity also means one consistent person to talk to. If your loved one is coming home from the hospital, we coordinate discharge planning so the transition is handled rather than improvised.
Costs depend on the level of support needed, so the honest answer comes from a conversation rather than a web page. What we can give you is context.
Published national cost-of-care survey data puts the Virginia median for a home health aide at roughly $32 an hour, which works out to about $6,292 a month at 44 hours a week. Note what that figure is and is not: 44 hours a week is part-time. It does not cover nights, weekends or the hours when families are most anxious.
For comparison, the Virginia median for assisted living was about $6,512 a month, and a semi-private nursing home room ran roughly $8,669 a month.
Live-in care in Virginia is priced differently from hourly care, usually on a daily rate rather than an hourly one, which is why it often costs considerably less than stacking up 24 hours of hourly shifts. If round-the-clock coverage is what your family actually needs, it is worth running the real numbers rather than assuming. We will do that with you on an intake call at no charge.
We accept private pay, long-term care insurance and Medicare Part C Advantage plans.
Long-term care insurance is a private policy bought years before care is needed, often in your 40s or 50s. Unlike health insurance, it exists specifically to pay for ongoing custodial care at home, in assisted living or in a nursing facility.
If your loved one holds a policy, benefits usually begin once they need help with two or more ADLs or have a documented cognitive impairment. Our team works directly with long-term care insurance carriers to verify coverage, open the claim, document services and manage the reimbursement paperwork.
Regular Medicare does not pay for ongoing non-medical home care, which surprises many Virginia families. Some Medicare Advantage plans have added limited in-home support benefits, and we will check what a specific plan actually covers.
Virginia Medicaid covers long-term care at home through the Commonwealth Coordinated Care Plus waiver, part of the state’s Medicaid program. Eligibility runs on both financial limits and a nursing-facility level-of-care determination, and applications go through your local social services office. If Medicaid is the likely route for your family, we can point you toward the right starting place.
Virginia has one of the highest concentrations of veterans in the country, so this comes up on a large share of our calls here.
Many of our veteran clients receive care through the VA’s Homemaker and Home Health Aide Care program, part of VA health benefits. It provides non-medical help in the home with bathing, dressing, grooming, meal preparation, light housekeeping and other daily tasks so veterans can stay independent.
As an accredited VA community care provider, Options Home Care can be paid directly by the VA for approved services.
To qualify, a veteran must:
Virginia veterans are typically enrolled through their nearest VA medical center or community-based outpatient clinic. Once approved, we work directly with the assigned social worker. We can also help you through the application itself.
Some veterans and surviving spouses may qualify for additional help through VA Aid and Attendance, which can offset non-medical home care costs depending on service history, discharge status, care needs and financial guidelines.
Yes, and in Virginia it is one of the more heavily used parts of the service.
That includes rides to medical appointments, therapy, church, social outings and community events, plus grocery shopping, prescription pickups, post office runs and everyday errands. It is available whether you have daily care, full-time live-in care, or short-term respite support.
Transportation with us is never a drop-off. Our caregivers help with mobility, stay through the appointment when that is useful, and report back to family afterward. That matters in rural parts of the state, where a specialist visit can mean a long drive and a full day, and in Northern Virginia, where the traffic alone can make an appointment exhausting for an older adult traveling alone.
Yes. Every caregiver goes through careful screening before placement, and many of our caregivers have been with Options Home Care for more than a decade. That tenure is worth asking about whenever you interview any agency, because caregiver turnover is the single biggest predictor of a bad experience.
It starts with an intake call. We talk through needs, the home, medical history, routines and personality. We then match you with qualified live-in caregivers, you interview them and choose who fits, and care begins. Our caregiver network lets us place care across Virginia, including areas where local agency options are thin.
Yes. Alongside daily and full-time care, we provide short-term coverage for when you are traveling, recovering from your own procedure, or simply need a break, including 24/7 live-in respite. Virginia families caring for a parent while raising children and holding a job often start here, then move to ongoing care later.
Yes. Along with 24/7 live-in care in Virginia, we offer AI-enhanced home care including AI fall detection, VR therapy, wearable monitors and robotic companion pets. For Virginia families spread between Arlington, Virginia Beach and points in between, remote visibility is often what makes a distance caregiving arrangement workable.
Often within days. After the initial call, we move to match you with qualified live-in caregivers based on needs, preferences and location. If your loved one is being discharged from a Virginia hospital on a short timeline, tell us that on the first call and we will work to that date.
Live-in care provides round-the-clock support from a vetted live-in caregiver. Hourly care covers scheduled visits. Families choose live-in when supervision needs to be continuous and when stability matters more than a few short visits a week.
There is also a cost dimension. Once a family needs more than roughly ten or twelve hours of daily coverage, hourly care in Virginia usually becomes the more expensive option, not the cheaper one.
Live-in care in Virginia provides 24-hour coverage, including personal care, meal preparation and daily routines, with built-in rest periods for the caregiver. The caregiver sleeps at night in the home and remains available if needed.
Yes. We assign the same live-in caregiver wherever possible, because long-term relationships build trust and comfort. For seniors with memory loss, consistency is not a nice extra. A familiar face reduces confusion and agitation in a way that a rotating schedule cannot.
Yes. You interview your caregiver before care begins and you choose. This is your parent’s home and the person entering it should feel right to your family.
We arrange backup coverage through our caregiver network so care continues without a gap. This protects your loved one and also protects the caregiver, who needs real time off to keep doing this work well. Before signing with any Virginia agency, ask them to explain their backup process specifically, because a private caregiver hired directly usually has no answer to this question.
Yes. Care includes personal care, bathing and dressing assistance, meal preparation, light housekeeping and support alongside services such as physical therapy when a therapist is also involved. The plan adapts as needs change rather than staying frozen at whatever was written on day one.
We serve families throughout Virginia, from Northern Virginia and the Richmond area to Hampton Roads, the Shenandoah Valley, Central Virginia and the southwestern counties, as part of a nationwide caregiver network.
If you need help finding local resources, your local area agency on aging and the state’s aging services office are useful starting points, and our team can help you work out how those fit alongside private insurance and VA benefits.
