Home Care in Paramus, NJ

Home care in Paramus, NJ is private-pay, non-medical support delivered in your parent’s own house — help with bathing, dressing, meals, medication reminders, walking and transfers, and company through the day — scheduled by the hour, overnight, or around the clock. Always Responsive Home Care arranges that care from an office at 140 East Ridgewood Avenue, Suite 415, in Paramus itself, which means the person taking your call knows which hospital you were just discharged from and which road you are stuck on.

Paramus is a borough of about 26,700 people spread across roughly 10.4 square miles, wrapped around the crossing of Route 4 and Route 17 and cut through by the Garden State Parkway. It borders Ridgewood, Fair Lawn, Glen Rock, Oradell, River Edge, Emerson, Maywood, Rochelle Park, Saddle Brook, Hackensack and the Township of Washington, and its named neighborhoods — Arcola, Bergen Place, Dunkerhook, Fairway Oaks and Spring Valley — are quiet residential streets sitting a few minutes from some of the busiest retail in the United States. Street addresses here use the 07652 ZIP code; 07653 is the borough’s post office box ZIP.

That combination is exactly why home care in Paramus looks different from home care one town over. More than four in five homes in the borough are owner-occupied, and many were bought by the families still living in them. People here do not want to move. They want to stay in the house, keep the doctors they have used for thirty years, and get to the senior center on Farview Avenue on Tuesday. Our job is to make that safe.

Always Responsive Home Care was founded by Teresa Sajkowski, RN, a geriatric registered nurse with more than twenty years of experience, and every care plan we write is built and supervised under that nurse-led model. We are a private-pay agency: no deposits, no long-term contracts, no cancellation penalties, and you are billed after care is delivered, not before.

Most home care in Paramus starts with a discharge date, not a plan. Paramus is unusual in that two hospitals sit inside the borough line, so a lot of those discharges are local.

The Valley Hospital moved out of Ridgewood and opened its new Paramus campus at 4 Valley Health Plaza on April 14, 2024 — navigation apps want 650 Winters Avenue — with 370 private inpatient rooms. Valley’s old emergency department on North Van Dien Avenue in Ridgewood closed permanently that same day, which still catches people out. Valley’s Luckow Pavilion at 1 Valley Health Plaza houses the Blumenthal Cancer Center and infusion services, so oncology visits often continue in Paramus long after a hospital stay ends.

Bergen New Bridge Medical Center sits farther east on the same street as our office, at 230 East Ridgewood Avenue. It is the largest hospital and the largest licensed nursing home in New Jersey, and it runs short-term rehabilitation, secure Alzheimer’s and dementia units, hospice and respite care on one campus.

For rehab in town, Dellridge Health & Rehabilitation Center on North Farview Avenue and CareOne at Ridgewood Avenue both take short-term rehab admissions, and Atlantic Rehabilitation runs outpatient therapy from the Atlantic Health System Paramus Pavilion at Paramus Park. Just outside the borough, families are discharged from Hackensack University Medical Center on Prospect Avenue, Holy Name Medical Center on Teaneck Road, and Hackensack Meridian Pascack Valley Medical Center on Old Hook Road in Westwood.

Whichever door they come out of, the first week home is the one that decides whether they stay home. Hospital-to-home care means someone is there to take the discharge paperwork seriously: meeting the equipment delivery, setting up medication reminders the way the discharge sheet describes them, clearing the path from the bed to the bathroom, and being awake for the first nights so a 3 a.m. trip does not become a second admission.

Discharge planners and rehab social workers cannot recommend one agency, so the choice lands on you, usually with about a day’s notice. Call us with the discharge date and we will tell you plainly what we can staff and when.

At the 2020 census, 24.2% of Paramus residents were 65 or older and the median age was 47.9 — older than Bergen County as a whole, and old enough that aging in place is a borough-wide question rather than a private one. Bergen County has the largest population of adults 60 and over of any county in New Jersey, more than 200,000 people, which is why the county built out its senior services early: the Division of Senior Services has been running since 1966 and now acts as the county’s Area Agency on Aging.

Good home care in Paramus works with what already exists rather than replacing it:

• The Joseph Cipolla Senior Activity Center at 93 North Farview Avenue is open at no charge to Paramus residents 62 and older, with chair yoga, Healthy Bones, line dancing, bocce, mahjong and canasta on the weekly calendar. Its senior bus runs door to door for food shopping.
• Van Saun County Park at 216 Forest Avenue covers more than 130 acres with over three miles of paved walking paths, the Bergen County Zoo and the Walden Pond lookouts. Bergen County residents 62 and over pay $2 for zoo admission — an easy outing with a grandchild.
• The Cliff Gennarelli-Paramus Sports-Plex at Paramus Road and Garden State Plaza Boulevard has a fitness walk used by residents of every age, and Petruska Park at 475 Farview Avenue is flat, close in, and easy to manage with a walker.
• The Paramus Public Library at 116 East Century Road and its Charles E. Reid Branch at 239 West Midland Avenue — originally a four-room schoolhouse built in 1876 — both run large-print and audio collections.
• Bergen County Meals on Wheels (201-336-7420) delivers to homebound residents 60 and older, but eligibility requires that the person receive no more than four hours of in-home assistance during the day. Worth knowing before you set a caregiver schedule.
• The Bergen County Division of Senior Services (201-336-7400) is the county’s Aging and Disability Resource Connection, and can help with benefits counseling, Medicare questions and home-modification referrals.

Our caregivers work around all of it — getting someone dressed and out the door for the Tuesday bus, keeping the Van Saun walk in the routine, being home when the meal delivery arrives.

Getting started

1. Call. Tell us what changed — a fall, a diagnosis, a discharge date, or just the slow realization that the current arrangement is not holding.
2. Consult. We come to the house, at no charge, and look at the actual rooms, the actual stairs, and the actual routine before we propose hours.
3. Care. We match a caregiver, write the plan, and stay involved as needs change.