EAST LONGMEADOW – One East Longmeadow home health agency has proved that seniors and people with disabilities can stay in their homes and still receive top-notch healthcare.

Golden Years Homecare was recently recognized with a “2020 Best of Home Care – Provider of Choice Award” from Home Care Pulse, an industry research and quality-assurance firm. Home Care Pulse reviews data, client satisfaction scores and caretaker turnover rates to determine the quality of care.

“It’s thrilling to see the efforts that Golden Years Home Care Services is making to provide outstanding care and employment,” Erik Madsen, CEO of Home Care Pulse, said in a press release on the award. “Golden Years Home Care Services has worked extremely hard to qualify to provide high-quality care and employment and this award allows them to provide proof of quality to potential new clients and caregivers. We are happy to recognize Golden Years Home Care Services as a Best of Home Care – Provider of Choice and to celebrate their accomplishments as a trusted home care provider.”

Chief Operations Officer Mary Flahive Dickson told Reminder Publishing, “It is not an award given lightly and that it was given to our agency here in East Longmeadow tells us our initiatives are working.”

She explained, “We’ve put forward various initiatives that we hoped would result in higher client satisfaction.” Those initiatives, which have been in place since March, include clear communication from the administrative staff, monthly educational training for the entire agency and in-house supervisors who touch base with each of the agency’s 530 clients every 60 days. The supervisors also check in monthly with the 500 caregivers, which Flahive Dickson called “the eyes and ears of the agency.”

Golden Years Homecare serves all of Western Massachusetts, large portions of Worcester County and is making inroads into eastern parts of the state. The agency is also licensed in Connecticut. The clients, who receive care that ranges from two hours per week to 24 hours per day, are a mixture of private clients; clients through Commonwealth Care Alliance, a Medicaid program and veterans through the Veterans Administration.

Flahive Dickson said that the need for home care, particularly among veterans, has skyrocketed since the pandemic began. “With COVID, nobody wants to be in a facility, they want to be at home,” she said. In her 24 years of working in the home health care industry, she said, she has never seen the need so acute.

Due to the growing need, Flahive Dickson said that the agency is hiring and ensuring the quality of those new hires through education. Flahive Dickson, who is an adjunct college professor in addition to her work at Golden Years Homecare, has created a curriculum for home health aide certification. Once someone has completed the 75-hour course, they are certified and guaranteed a job.

“We’re putting quality providers into people’s homes,” she said, “as well as providing a job for people, many of whom have been displaced by COVID. To me, that is a huge factor in why we’re going in the direction we are.”

For more information about Golden Years Home Care Services, visit www.goldenyearsusa.com.