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

This is the first question almost everybody asks, so here is the answer without the sales pitch. We provide home care in 29 Middlesex County towns, townships and township sections: Avenel, Carteret, Cranbury, Dunellen, East Brunswick, Edison, Helmetta, Highland Park, Keasbey, Laurence Harbor, Metuchen, Middlesex, Milltown, Monroe Township, New Brunswick, North Brunswick Township, Old Bridge, Parlin, Perth Amboy, Piscataway, Plainsboro Township, Port Reading, Sayreville, Sewaren, South Brunswick Township, South Plainfield, South River, Spotswood, Woodbridge Township.

If your parent's address is in one of those, we come out. Our office is at 348 Applegarth Road in Monroe Township, and our team is reachable around the clock, including the evening you find out a discharge has been moved up a day.

The service areas page lists every ZIP code we hold, in case your town spans more than one.

Most families do not go looking for home care. They get handed a list of agencies by a case manager and told the discharge is Thursday. It helps to know the map.

New Brunswick, the county seat, is the county's medical center of gravity: Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, a Level I trauma center, and Saint Peter's University Hospital both sit in New Brunswick alongside Rutgers. Northern Middlesex leans on Hackensack Meridian JFK University Medical Center in Edison, a 499-bed hospital whose campus also holds the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute and the Hartwyck at Oak Tree skilled nursing center. Toward the bayshore, Raritan Bay Medical Center runs campuses in Perth Amboy and Old Bridge. And the county itself operates the two Roosevelt Care Centers, on Parsonage Road in Edison and Marlboro Road in Old Bridge, through the Middlesex County Improvement Authority, for long-term, dementia, sub-acute, respite and hospice care.

Wherever the stay happened, the pattern afterward is the same: rehabilitation ends before recovery does, and the riskiest month is the one spent at home without anyone in the house. That month is what hospital-to-home care is for.

Middlesex County covers roughly 322 square miles and 25 municipalities. With about 883,000 residents it is the state's third most populous county, and around 17 percent of those residents are 65 or older. Averages hide a lot here, because the county is really three places, and care looks different in each.

• The north. Edison, the county's largest municipality at about 107,000 people, plus Woodbridge, Piscataway, Metuchen, Carteret and South Plainfield. Dense, older housing, Northeast Corridor commuting, and the point where the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway cross in Woodbridge. Two-story houses where the only full bathroom is upstairs are common here, and stairs tend to drive the care plan.
• The middle. New Brunswick and Highland Park, wrapped around Rutgers and the hospital corridor, where a caregiver may be five minutes from the specialist and forty minutes from a parking space.
• The south. Monroe Township, the largest municipality by area at just over 42 square miles, together with Old Bridge, South Brunswick, Cranbury and Plainsboro. Newer, lower-density development and much longer drives, which is why live-in and longer shifts are more common down here than three-hour visits.

We are based in the south of the county, in Monroe Township, and staff across all three.

Private home care should not be the first phone call for everything. Middlesex County funds a real amount of help, and families routinely pay for services they could have had for free or nearly free.

• Middlesex County Office of Aging and Disabled Services, 75 Bayard Street in New Brunswick, 732-745-3295. The county's designated area agency on aging and the lead for its Aging and Disability Resource Connection. Ask about home-delivered meals, health insurance counseling, prescription assistance and the Aging and Disabled Resource Directory.
• Middlesex County RIDE, 800-221-3520. Reservation-based shared rides for adults 60 and over and for residents 18 and over with disabilities; the fixed RIDE Routes shuttles need no booking at all.
• Your town's senior center. Nearly every municipality in the county runs one, with meals, exercise classes, benefits counseling and, in many towns, a shuttle bus.

Use those first. Then buy private care for the hours they cannot reach, which is almost always evenings, weekends, personal care, and anything that depends on the same person showing up and knowing your mother's routine.