What are Consumer Directed Services:
Around one out of every three Missouri adults have a disability that makes it difficult to care for themselves. Your mom is an MO HealthNet member, and she’s heard she can hire you to provide her home care services with consumer directed services. How does it work?
Consumer Directed Services (CDS) operates through Missouri’s Medicaid program. Adults with physical disabilities can hire people to help them with activities of daily living.
What Conditions Qualify for Consumer Directed Services?
What conditions qualify your mom to pay you for care? Suppose she has breast cancer and the chemo and radiation treatments leave her feeling nauseous and shaky. Cancer care is one of many disabling diseases that qualify for CDS. Others include kidney failure, heart disease, COPD, and chronic arthritis pain.
What Are Activities of Daily Living?
There are activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). ADLs are required for daily living as they cover personal care tasks like using a toilet, showering, and getting dressed. Others are eating and drinking, walking around, and getting out of bed. If your mom wakes up and cannot sit up and get out of bed, she needs help.
IADLs are also designed to help with personal care, but they’re designed to improve quality of life. While eating a meal and drinking water are ADLs, cooking those meals and getting drinks is instrumental, so it’s an IADL. Planning a menu and shopping for groceries are IADLs.
Your mom’s qualify of life also requires her to pay bills on time and manage her money. IADLs include sorting mail, paying bills on time, and balancing accounts. Driving to stores and medical offices are also crucial to her well-being, so they’re included. She can’t do these things independently, so she must have someone help her.
There’s one essential rule to keep in mind. Your mom must be able to hire you and train you to help her. If she’s not cognitively able to instruct you, she will not qualify for CDS. This rules out diseases like Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.
How Does She Get Started?
Your mom needs to qualify for nursing-home level care. She has to be a Missouri resident and require help with activities of daily living. A specialist in Consumer Directed Services will go to her home and assess her needs. During this visit, the number of hours of care is decided.
Once she’s given the green light, your mom can start interviewing possible caregivers, whether it’s you, another family member, a family friend, or someone else. She will arrange care with that person and train how to best help her.
Help your mom learn more about Consumer Directed Services. Call a Missouri CDS specialist or fill out the online application.
If you or an aging loved-one is considering Consumer Directed Services in Florissant, MO please contact the caring staff at Home Care MO today. (314) 501-5330
We offer consumer directed services (CDS) in St. Louis County, St. Louis City and St. Charles, as well as Crawford, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Montgomery, Pike, St. Francois, Ste Genevieve, Warren and Washington Counties.
Home Care MO was established by veteran home care agency owners. Home Care MO is a home care agency that works with Missouri’s Consumer Directed Services (CDS) program. CDS is a Medicaid-funded program that enables you to hire the person of your choice to help with your care. This caregiver is also called a personal care attendant (PCA).
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