Live-in & Hourly Home Care Always Available in Bergen County

Home care in Bergen County, NJ is private-pay, non-medical help delivered in an older adult’s own home — bathing, dressing, meals, light housekeeping, medication reminders, mobility support and company — so they can stay where they are instead of moving. Always Responsive Home Care runs that service across Bergen County from an office at 140 East Ridgewood Avenue, Suite 415 in Paramus, under care plans built and supervised on the nurse-led model our founder, Teresa Sajkowski, RN, a geriatric registered nurse with more than twenty years of experience, established.

Bergen is the most populous county in New Jersey — 955,732 residents at the 2020 census — and it has the largest population of adults 60 and over of any county in the state, more than 200,000 people, which is over a fifth of everyone who lives here. That is the backdrop to almost every call we take: an adult child in their fifties, a parent in their eighties, and a house that suddenly does not work the way it used to.

Care is scheduled the way the week actually runs:

• Hourly care for the mornings and evenings, when getting up, getting washed and getting to bed are the risky parts of the day.
• Overnight care when night-time wandering or a 3 a.m. trip to the bathroom is what is keeping the family awake.
• Live-in care and 24-hour care when someone can no longer be alone, with live-in often costing less than covering the same day in shifts.
• Personal care, companion care, Alzheimer’s and dementia care and respite care for a family caregiver who is running out of road.

We are a private-pay agency. No deposits, no long-term contracts, no cancellation penalties, and you are billed after care is delivered. Call (201) 977-8779 to talk it through, or read our guide to home care in Paramus.

Families searching for home health care in Bergen County, NJ usually mean one of two very different services, and the difference decides who pays.

Home health care is skilled, clinical care ordered by a physician: nursing visits, wound care, physical or occupational therapy, usually for a defined stretch after a hospital stay. It is delivered by a Medicare-certified agency and Medicare may cover it.

Home care — what we provide — is non-medical. In New Jersey the hands-on personal care piece is delivered by Certified Home Health Aides (CHHAs), who are trained and certified through the New Jersey Board of Nursing but do not perform skilled nursing tasks. It is open-ended, it is scheduled around the family’s week rather than a physician’s order, and it is normally private pay.

Most Bergen County families end up needing both at once: a Medicare-certified agency sending a therapist twice a week, and a caregiver from us covering the rest of the week. We do not bill Medicare or Medicaid, and when a loved one needs skilled nursing or therapy we say so and point you to an agency that provides it.

If you are still working out which one you are looking for, start with home health care vs. home care or what a home health aide does.

Bergen County packs 70 municipalities — more local governments than any other county in New Jersey — into roughly 233 square miles of land, which is why “we serve Bergen County” is close to meaningless on its own. Here is the actual list of towns our Paramus office covers:

Allendale, Alpine, Bergenfield, Closter, Cresskill, Demarest, Dumont, Emerson, Fair Lawn, Franklin Lakes, Glen Rock, Harrington Park, Haworth, Hillsdale, Mahwah, Midland Park, Montvale, New Milford, Northvale, Norwood, Oakland, Oradell, Paramus, Park Ridge, Ramsey, Ridgewood, River Edge, Saddle River, Tenafly, Township Of Washington, Waldwick, Westwood, Woodcliff Lake, Wyckoff.

Those towns fall into four very different corners of the county, and the practical work of home care changes with each one.

The northwest hills. Mahwah, Oakland, Franklin Lakes, Ramsey, Allendale, Saddle River, Wyckoff, Waldwick and Midland Park sit where the county climbs into the Ramapo Mountains. Mahwah alone covers 26 square miles — the largest municipality in the county by area — and holds Bald Mountain, the county high point at 1,152 feet. Getting a caregiver up a long private driveway during an ice storm is a different problem from parking on a side street in Fair Lawn, and it belongs in the schedule, not in a surprise phone call.

The Pascack Valley. Emerson, Hillsdale, Montvale, Park Ridge, Westwood, Woodcliff Lake and the Township of Washington form the valley named for the Pascack Brook. Westwood anchors it with Hackensack Meridian Pascack Valley Medical Center on Old Hook Road, and NJ Transit’s Pascack Valley Line runs the length of it — which matters when the adult child managing the care lives in Manhattan and visits on weekends.

The Northern Valley. Alpine, Closter, Cresskill, Demarest, Harrington Park, Haworth, Northvale, Norwood and Tenafly run north along the Palisades toward the New York line. It is the quietest, leafiest part of our territory and home to a long-established Korean community, and it is also the furthest from a hospital of anywhere we serve.

Central Bergen. Paramus, Ridgewood, Fair Lawn, Glen Rock, River Edge, Oradell, New Milford, Dumont and Bergenfield sit in the dense middle of the county, near the hospitals and near the Route 4 and Route 17 corridors. It is also the corner where Bergen’s Sunday closing laws bite hardest — Bergen is the only county in New Jersey still enforcing them, so Sunday errands mean the pharmacy and the supermarket, not the mall. See every town and ZIP code we cover.

Most home care starts on a discharge date. Bergen County has an unusually dense hospital landscape, and knowing which building your parent is leaving changes what the first week at home needs to look like.

• The Valley Hospital, 4 Valley Health Plaza, Paramus. Valley moved out of Ridgewood and opened this campus on April 14, 2024 with 370 private inpatient rooms; the old Ridgewood emergency department on North Van Dien Avenue closed permanently the same day. Its Luckow Pavilion at 1 Valley Health Plaza houses the Blumenthal Cancer Center.
• Bergen New Bridge Medical Center, 230 East Ridgewood Avenue, Paramus — the largest hospital and the largest licensed nursing home in New Jersey, with short-term rehabilitation, secure Alzheimer’s and dementia units, hospice and respite care on one campus.
• Hackensack University Medical Center, 30 Prospect Avenue, Hackensack.
• Holy Name Medical Center, 718 Teaneck Road, Teaneck.
• Hackensack Meridian Pascack Valley Medical Center, 250 Old Hook Road, Westwood — a 128-bed community hospital serving the Pascack and Northern Valleys.
• Christian Health, 299 Sicomac Avenue, Wyckoff — the David F. Bolger Post-acute Care Unit, Heritage Manor skilled nursing, Southgate Special Care and Longview Assisted Living, on one campus in the northwest of the county.

Whichever one it is, the handover home is the fragile part: the equipment delivery, the medication schedule as the discharge sheet actually writes it, the path from the bed to the bathroom, and someone awake for the first nights. That is what hospital-to-home care is for. Call (201) 977-8779 with the discharge date and we will tell you plainly what we can staff and when.

Paid caregivers are one layer. Bergen County built its own layer early — the Division of Senior Services has been running since 1966 under the Older Americans Act and now serves as the county’s Area Agency on Aging and its Aging and Disability Resource Connection. Before you decide how many hours to buy, it is worth knowing what the county already offers:

• Division of Senior Services, 201-336-7400. Benefits counseling, Medicare guidance, home-modification and repair referrals, care management referrals and a wellness check program.
• Bergen County Meals on Wheels, 201-336-7420. Home-delivered meals for homebound residents 60 and over. Note the eligibility rule that surprises families: the recipient must receive no more than four hours of in-home assistance during the day, so it interacts directly with how you schedule paid care.
• Senior activity centers. County centers run Monday to Friday, including the Northwest Senior Activity Center at 46-50 Center Street in Midland Park and the United Senior Activity Center at 101 Hudson Street in Hackensack. Many towns also run their own — Paramus operates the Joseph Cipolla Senior Activity Center on North Farview Avenue free of charge for residents 62 and over, with a door-to-door bus for food shopping.
• Bergen County Community Transportation, 201-368-5955. Rides for older adults and people with disabilities, which can cover routine appointments and free up paid hours for the parts of the day that matter more.

Our caregivers work around these rather than replacing them: getting someone ready for the senior center bus, being home when the meal delivery arrives, keeping the appointment calendar straight. If you want help figuring out where the county programs stop and paid care should start, that is a good reason to call.