About Rural Metro, which I thought I wouldn’t do

because I thought I wouldn’t care,

but I do,

so I am.

Rural Metro provided me with an opportunity to make a little money, help some people and do something beside sit around the house waiting for Spring. I had a good experience at first (see Clients) but it turned sour when I was accused of stealing, attacked with NO recourse, and patients died (thank God not in my presence). The folks at Rural Metro, the ones called “coordinators”, have an extremely difficult job. They try to keep coverage with a swelling population of, in many cases, very ill people in need of skilled, caring help using, I’m afraid to say, a labor pool consisting of mostly folks whom are willing to put themselves into impossible, occasionally, situations for $6.25 an hour (if they’re riding public transportation), a little more if they have transportation. I’d hesitate to say, but I will, that most of these folks who do this job have little other skills to bargain with in a very tough job market and due to the difficulties of the tasks involved, the turn over rate is extremely high (hey, I only lasted two months). I would also suppose that these operations, like Rural Metro, are gold mines as they probably pay extremely high hourly rates from insurance companies or Government programs like Medicaid, and less a basic $6.25 or so per hour result in a great bottom line. The economics of this business explains, to me at least, the drive to keep clients “covered” at all times and use the aides as soldiers, pawns really, to generate profits and hey, I’m not against capitalism, but I do wonder about the ethics of this.

The combination of an expanding client base, which is only going to get much, much worse and larger as time goes by (the baby boomers come to mind), addressed by a pool of low skilled entry level “care takers” seems to me a recipe for an on-going, lack luster medical system desperately in need of repairs. I’ve seen, in only two months, people who should NOT be let alone even if it is, on paper, a cheaper way to care for them. People who take so many medications (thirty per day in many cases, that they can’t keep track and rely, if they’re lucky, on family members for assistance) probably shouldn’t be alone, in my humble opinion. In a lot of cases, and admittedly I haven’t been involved in “a lot of cases”, individuals become isolated and lonely and the Home Health Aid becomes the focus for these people for any relationship to the outside world.

I wish I had better answers to this mess, but I can say this job is no longer for me and I’d go on to say that should I find myself, later in live hopefully, in need of this type service, I will find another alternative.