Each year ECS Home Care helps over 150 seniors continue living safely at home. During the recent transit strike in Philadelphia, ECS was able to continue providing services to 75% of home care clients, despite the fact that over 90% of home health aides rely on public transportation. The entire ECS Home Care staff worked together to ferry staff to clients' homes, ensuring that homebound seniors like Richard received the services they need.
Richard's house is full of furniture he built with his own hands. His walls are filled with photographs of his late wife, Cecilia, their three sons and lots of grandchildren and great grandchildren. It's no wonder he wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
Richard has lived alone since Cecilia passed away in 2003. They were married for 41 years and bought their row house in the Ogontz section of Philadelphia in the 1980s after Richard hung up his tool belt and took a job as a janitor.
At 78 he has a variety of medical conditions that require the twice-daily visits from ECS home health aides. Years mowing lawns and climbing ladders for his own landscaping and handyman business did a number on his knees. These days he is mostly confined to the first floor of his house, where his electric scooter takes him from the kitchen to the living room and back.
"I used to like to drive. The hardest thing for me was to give up my keys, but I just couldn't get in and out of my truck anymore," he said.
When he was still mobile, Richard would drive all over the country for fellowship weekends with his church, from upstate New York to the hills of Kentucky. Now he keeps busy with regular visits to his local senior center and urges other people his age to do the same.
"I fool around with the computer and watch the television, but they don't talk to me. I tell people, take part in your local senior center, even if it's just drinking coffee. You have to keep your mind and body active."
Richard is very grateful for the services that ECS Home Care provides. There are times when he calls to ask if an aide could come a little later so that he won't have to go to bed early. ECS provides him the later service. ECS also attempts to limit the number of different aides who provide his care, so that Richard can have more privacy and consistency. It all adds up to a continued quality of life in the home he loves.
"I'm more independent here. I can do what I want to do," Richard said. "If you're somewhere you don't want to be, you don't last long because your mind is not satisfied."