GIVING SENIOR HOME CARE A LIVELY BOOST

Senior home care, the growing industry of non-medical services for aging Americans, is seeing a growing demand for live entertainment as part of its palette of offerings. In response to that demand, a new company called Home Klowns announced that it is open for business in several major U.S. cities.

“We’re partnering with several long-established senior home care organizations,” CEO Bradley Dipple explains. “I tell them to think of us as a mood consultant.” The provider contracts for a Home Klown performer to visit its clients, and decides whether to foot the bill itself or pass along the fee to the customer.

Dipple said he and his partners realized that quality of life in a person’s later years can involve not only in-home care, respite care, and cleaning and upkeep of the client’s living space, but mood-enhancing services, such as comedy, movement, and color. “If you provide laughter and joy to elder shut-ins, you boost their quality of life,” he says.

While clowns, magicians, dancers, and poets may not be eligible for Medicare reimbursement – “yet,” Dipple asserts optimistically – senior home care providers have been somewhat receptive to the idea of including Home Klowns as an extra among their array of services, especially after seeing the enthusiastic response of their clients.

“We agree that live entertainment, right in your home, can provide an extra zing for seniors that high-def cable, movies on DVD, or books on tape don’t necessarily achieve,” says Morton Blomkin, president of Residential Valkyries, a home care company that primarily serves the Midwest. “As the Baby Boom generation continues to age, Home Klowns could be a model for all-round senior home care services in the future.”

Once they know what’s possible, some senior clients who have the wherewithal to pay for extra entertainment services begin to request all kinds of live entertainers to come to their residence, according to Amy Capleton, director of programming at Home Klowns.

“We’ve had customers request everything from Irish step dancing to monologues from Shakespeare in their living room,” she recalls. Some even enjoy a gardening demonstration or scrapbooking workshop, because those were their favorite activities before arthritis in their fingers or general mobility posed too much of a challenge to continue.

Capleton added that a few elder male shut-ins have even asked whether the company could send over an exotic dancer. “We’re waiting on a decision from corporate headquarters as to whether this would be an appropriate service.”

The biggest challenge, according to Dipple, is reaching rural shut-ins who have so little access to senior home care services in general. In any case, he says, Home Klowns fully expects to have operational branches in more than a dozen U.S. cities by the end of the year.