Right at Home Winchester marks a decade of providing personal care | Winchester Star

WINCHESTER — Right at Home Winchester is celebrating its first decade of serving residents of the Northern Shenandoah Valley and beyond.

Peter Lawrence, owner and administrator of the company at 918 Amherst St., oversees 90 employees, including 83 certified nursing assistants (CNAs) who work in clients’ places of residence to help with light housekeeping, grocery shopping, meal preparations, personal hygiene and much more.

In a nutshell, Right at Home Winchester’s CNAs serve as personal companions for adults who have a medical condition and need the type of one-on-one help that a family member would provide. Their help is vital in situations where a client has no family that can provide such care or when an overburdened family caretaker needs a break.

“We send CNAs into people’s homes to help them (the clients) really just stay safely and comfortably there,” Lawrence said on Thursday. “I always tell families to consider Right at Home their loved one’s personal assistant.”

Right at Home Winchester is a private provider because most insurance companies do not cover personal care services. Lawrence said its fees are not exactly inexpensive but are still affordable for most families, and military veterans can get the company’s services for free thanks to a partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

There are similarities between Right at Home Winchester and other in-home services such as hospice or physical therapy, so Lawrence said his personnel work in tandem with other providers to ensure clients have sufficient one-on-one assistance to remain as independent as possible in their own homes.

“If the wife or husband needs to go run errands or keep their own life moving along, they often will just need to have relief from bedside sitting or from having constant eyes on someone,” Lawrence said. “Hospice doesn’t offer that type of respite, so they bring us in to make sure that they can go to the grocery store, take a nap, go out with friends, keep their life moving, knowing that their loved one is safe and comfortable and has someone right there with them.”

The type of service provided by Right at Home Winchester is called “non-medical medical home care,” Lawrence said. That means the CNAs cannot do things like change bandages and give injections, so those tasks are left to a client’s other in-home service providers.

Lawrence said he was living in Sterling when he decided to open a Right at Home franchise. He visited the company’s corporate offices in Nebraska and asked about launching an office in Northern Virginia, but that territory was already taken. However, they had a service gap in the Winchester area and Lawrence accepted the opportunity.

There have been a few bumps in the road since Right at Home Winchester’s opening in 2015, the biggest of which was the COVID-19 pandemic that started in March 2020. After all, how can you offer in-home personal care services when you’re being told to maintain six-foot distances between people and are worried about your own personnel getting sick?

“It was awful,” Lawrence said. “There was that initial period where we weren’t even sure if we could ask a caregiver to go into a home … because of the fact that COVID may be present. So we had to watch the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) every day and learn what they were saying was safe and not safe, which changed every single day for months and months and months. It was really sketchy at the beginning but I’m proud of the fact that we got through it because it was taxing for healthcare companies.”

Lawrence takes little credit for keeping Right at Home Winchester open and operating during the two-year pandemic.

“It was these guys,” he said, motioning toward the six administrative employees who work with him in the Amherst Street office. The office personnel have a special understanding of client needs because everyone on the payroll, including Lawrence, is either a CNA or personal care assistant (PCA).

Lawrence said he values all of the employees that keep his business running. Because of them, Right at Home Winchester has never told a client that they cannot provide assistance, even if it’s a holiday or the middle of the night.

“We take turns being on call because home care never sleeps,” he said. “It is not an easy job so when we can relax and play and have a nice lunch, we will try to do that. But when we have to work hard, I can really count on these guys so I do try to take care of them. We pay for their health care and a bunch of other benefits, and try to make it a good place to work because sometimes, you’ve got to really dig in.”

Right at Home Winchester is based in a former single-family home that is not nearly spacious enough to accommodate 90 employees, but that’s not a problem because Lawrence said the majority of his CNAs only come in for trainings or special events. Otherwise, they remain in the field working with clients.

There is a downside to that, though. Lawrence said it’s exceedingly rare for his entire staff to assemble in the same place at the same time.

“But when they come together, they often have so much fun talking about shared complaints and shared victories,” he said.

In order to ensure his entire staff can celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary, Lawrence has booked the Backseat Events venue in Winchester for a private party on Nov. 15. Entertainment will be provided by the Larry Keel Experience, a popular, award-winning Americana/bluegrass band that is based in Lexington and tours extensively.

“We’re going to have dinner and drinks,” he said, “so everyone can just relax and not think about home care for a few hours.”

To learn more about Right at Home Winchester and its services, visit rightathome.net/winchester.