Allentown, PA Home Care for a Parent Who Wants to Stay Home

Almost nobody starts looking for home care in Allentown, PA on a calm afternoon. They start in a hospital corridor, holding a discharge date, a bag of new prescriptions and a parent who is very clear that they are going home. In this city that corridor is usually at Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest on South Cedar Crest Boulevard, the largest hospital in the Lehigh Valley and the region's Level I trauma center; at Lehigh Valley Hospital–17th Street on West Chew Street, next to the Allentown Fairgrounds; or at one of St. Luke's two Allentown campuses, the Allentown Campus and the Sacred Heart Campus.

Plenty of people do not go straight home. They spend two or three weeks first at Good Shepherd's rehabilitation campus on South Fifth Street in south Allentown, at Cedar Crest Post Acute on South Cedar Crest Boulevard, at the Phoebe Allentown Health Care Center on West Turner Street, or at Cedarbrook on South Cedarbrook Road, the nursing home Lehigh County has run in one form or another since the 1840s. Wherever the stay ends, the difficult day is the same one: the morning the therapists stop coming and the house goes quiet. That is the gap hospital to home care exists to close — someone in the house for the first shower, the first flight of stairs, the medication list nobody can decipher, and the follow-up appointment three days out.

Allentown is not one kind of house, and that matters more to daily care than most families expect. Center City and the Wards just east of downtown went up during the industrial boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s: rows and twins on narrow lots, a stoop at the sidewalk, a staircase that turns halfway up, and the only full bathroom on the second floor. West of 15th Street, the West End opens into larger single-family homes with deeper porches and side yards. South of Little Lehigh Creek the South Side runs toward Emmaus; east across the Lehigh River the East Side runs toward Bethlehem. Out at the western edge, in 18104, 18106 and 18195, the blocks get newer and single-floor living gets easier to find.

None of that is trivia. In a Center City row home, the bathroom upstairs is the whole care plan — it decides whether a parent recovering from a hip replacement can be left alone for an hour, whether a shower chair fits, and whether the safest place to sleep is temporarily the front room. A first visit here is often as much about the stairs, the doorways and the winter stoop as it is about the diagnosis, which is why mobility care and personal care tend to be the first two things Allentown families ask about.