HHA Certification

Take Your Career to the Next Level

5 Most Important Skills for a Certified Home Health Aide

Send to Kindle

A successful Certified Home Health Aide needs specific skills that other health care providers may not. Here is a list of the five most important.

Certified Home Health Aides are a very important piece of the Health Care Industry.  Caring for a patient in their own home can be difficult and challenging, but at the same time it can be fun and rewarding.  A successful HHA needs to possess unique skills that many other health care providers may not.  Before you decide to pursue a career as a Certified Home Health Aide, take a look at this list of the five most important skills you’ll need to be a great in home caregiver.

Certified Home Health Aide Skills

Patience

certified home health aide skillsYou have to always remember that you are working for people that are unable to do things for themselves that they have probably always been able to do, so they may be frustrated and impatient.  Although it may not be written in the HHA job description, it is your job as the care provider to be the calm patient professional.  In most cases the patients frustration is not with you, but with their inability to perform the tasks they have for most of their lives.  Also, many patients, especially the elderly, have certain ways they like to have things done and you must do your best to accommodate them and this can cause you frustration, patience is certainly a virtue in this situations.

Detailed Oriented

Even though most of your time may be spent performing tasks that may not seem health related, you have to always remember that you are there as a Home Health Aide and the patients health is your top priority so you must always observe the patient and note every detail of their overall health.  You need to notice when they seem more tired than usual, or have less of an appetite than normal.  These may seem like small details, but they can be indicators of larger issues brewing and you should take good notes and always report anything out of the ordinary, no matter how small it may seem.

Physical Stamina

Your job as a Certified Home Health Aide will almost always require you to perform physical tasks.  Some may be as minor as cleaning dirty dishes, and some may be as strenuous as moving furniture, so it is important that you are capable and comfortable performing various physical activities.  You might be surprised by some of the unusual tasks a Home Health Aide is asked to do.

Time Management

Your patients will rely on you to help them through their daily activities and many of them will have specific schedules that need to be adhered to so it is essential that you manage your time well and stick to whatever schedule is provided to you by your agency or by the patient.  This is especially important if your patient is elderly.

Interpersonal Skills

Finally, and maybe the most important skill of all is the ability to get along with your patients.  In a hospital setting it is easy for a nurse or other caregiver to perform a single task then leave the patient alone in their room.  This is not the case for home health aides.  You will generally be in constant contact with your patient for the duration of your time at their home.  This requires you to have exceptional personal skills.  You will need to start conversations and generally keep the patient engaged while you care for them.  This ability will not only benefit the patient, it will preserve your sanity!  Nothing is worse than spending hours and hours with someone and just staring at each other, its uncomfortable and no fun.  In this career a little personality can go a long way!

So, Do You Have What it Takes to be a Certified Home Health Aide?

So do you have the necessary skills to be a great HHA?  If you think a career in home health care is for you, take a minute to fill out the form at the top of this page and get started finding a HHA training program that is right for you.  Getting started as a Certified Home Health Aide is easy and doesn’t take as long as you might think!

Back to Top