Home Health Care in Monmouth County, NJ

About one in five Monmouth County residents is 65 or older — 21.4 percent at the most recent Census count, against roughly 18 percent statewide. That makes this one of New Jersey’s older counties, and one where the phrase “home health care” gets used for two very different things.

Medicare-certified home health is skilled, doctor-ordered and intermittent: a nurse or a physical therapist coming a few times a week for a defined recovery period, then stopping when the episode closes.

Non-medical home care — what Always Responsive Home Care provides throughout Monmouth County — is the hands-on daily support that fills the rest of the week. Bathing and dressing. Transfers and walking. Meals, medication reminders, laundry, the drive to the cardiologist in Red Bank. Someone in the house overnight so nobody tries the stairs alone at three in the morning.

Most families who call us are somewhere in the middle: a parent came home from CentraState or Riverview with therapy scheduled twice a week, and inside forty-eight hours it was obvious that twice a week was not the problem being solved. If you are still sorting out which one you need, we wrote a plain comparison of home health care versus home care.

We have been doing this since 2010. Always Responsive Home Care was founded by Teresa Sajkowski, a registered nurse with more than two decades of hospital and hospice experience, and our Monmouth County office is at 78 Court Street in Freehold — open Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with the phone answered around the clock at (732) 201-4141.

Responsive home care is less a service tier than an operating habit, and it comes down to three things families can check for in any Monmouth County agency they call.

1. Somebody picks up. Our Freehold office keeps regular weekday hours, but the phone is answered 24 hours a day — which matters most at 9 p.m. on a Sunday, when the hospital case manager has gone home and the discharge is Monday.
2. The plan is built around the person. Care here is scoped to the client rather than sold as a package: a few hours a week of companion care at one end, continuous live-in coverage at the other, and every step in between.
3. The plan moves when the person does. Needs after a stroke or a dementia diagnosis rarely hold still. Hourly to overnight to live-in to palliative support is one agency and one set of caregivers, not a fresh search each time the situation changes.

The agency was started by a nurse, and it shows in how the plans get written — more about that on our Monmouth County team page.

Where a parent is discharged from tells you most of what the first week at home is going to look like. Five acute-care hospitals serve Monmouth County families:

• CentraState Medical Center, 901 West Main Street (Route 537) in Freehold Township — a 284-bed community hospital, partnered with Atlantic Health System since 2022, and the default for western Monmouth. Short-term rehab frequently continues next door at The Manor Health and Rehabilitation Center, on the same campus.
• Riverview Medical Center, One Riverview Plaza in Red Bank — Hackensack Meridian’s hospital for the Two River towns.
• Bayshore Medical Center, 727 North Beers Street in Holmdel — minutes from Hazlet, Matawan, Union Beach and Keansburg.
• Monmouth Medical Center, 300 Second Avenue in Long Branch — an RWJBarnabas hospital and the first hospital ever built in Monmouth and Ocean counties.
• Jersey Shore University Medical Center, 1945 Route 33 in Neptune — Hackensack Meridian’s academic campus and the region’s Level I adult and pediatric trauma center, which is where a bad fall or a highway accident ends up.

Sub-acute rehab is its own map: The Manor in Freehold, CareOne at Wall, CareOne at King James in Atlantic Highlands, Jersey Shore Post Acute just off Route 18 in Neptune. Discharge from any of them tends to arrive on short notice — a Friday afternoon call telling you your mother comes home Saturday, with a walker she has never used and a front step she cannot manage.

That is the call we are built for. See how we handle hospital-to-home care, mobility and transfer support, and overnight care for the first fragile nights back.

Monmouth County runs from Raritan Bay in the north down to Manasquan in the south, and inland to the Mercer County line. Home care looks genuinely different in each corner of it.

The Bayshore — Union Beach, Keansburg, Highlands, Atlantic Highlands, Matawan, Cliffwood, Hazlet, Holmdel, Middletown. Superstorm Sandy rewrote this coastline in 2012, and many of the homes rebuilt since sit elevated above base flood elevation, which in daily practice means a long exterior staircase between the driveway and the front door. For a client three days out from a hip replacement, that staircase is the entire care plan.

The Two River area — Red Bank, Rumson, Little Silver, Oceanport, Monmouth Beach, Lincroft, Eatontown, Tinton Falls, Long Branch, West Long Branch. Older multi-level housing around the Navesink and Shrewsbury rivers: the kind of house where the bedrooms are upstairs and the only comfortable chair is downstairs. Aging in place here usually comes down to a stairlift or a caregiver on the stairs.

The shore towns — Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Avon-by-the-Sea, Belmar, Allenhurst, Deal, Interlaken, Neptune City, Ocean Township, Wall, Sea Girt, Manasquan, Brielle. Ocean Grove, inside Neptune Township, is a National Register historic district holding the largest assemblage of authentic Victorian architecture in the United States, packed into well under a square mile of narrow lanes — houses built as 19th-century summer cottages, long before anyone designed a home around aging in it. Shore towns also empty out after Labor Day, which matters a great deal when a widowed parent’s closest neighbor turns out to be a summer renter.

Western Monmouth — Freehold, Manalapan, Marlboro, Morganville, Englishtown, Colts Neck, Millstone, Perrineville, Howell, and the farm country out through Upper Freehold, Cream Ridge, Allentown and Roosevelt. This is where the county’s 55-plus communities are: Covered Bridge in Manalapan, roughly 1,500 condominiums and single-story townhomes where an upper-level unit means a full flight of stairs every single day; Four Seasons at Manalapan, 692 single-family homes; Greenbriar at Marlboro. Further west the farm roads get long and CentraState in Freehold is the nearest hospital by some distance.

Everything in this county moves on the Garden State Parkway, Route 9, Route 18, Route 33, Route 35 and Route 36, and anyone who has tried to cross Monmouth at 7 a.m. knows what that costs. Which town a caregiver comes from matters as much as which hours they can work.

Home care is one piece of the picture. The county runs several programs that pair well with it, and most families discover them far too late:

• Monmouth County Division on Aging, Disabilities and Veterans Services, 3000 Kozloski Road in Freehold, (732) 431-7450. This is the county’s Area Agency on Aging and the lead agency for its Aging and Disability Resource Connection — the right first call for benefits screening, caregiver support programs and respite funding.
• Ride in Monmouth, the county Division of Transportation service long known as SCAT, for transportation-dependent seniors and residents with permanent disabilities. (732) 431-6480.
• The county Wellness Transportation Program, run with EZ Ride, offers residents 18 and over up to two free round trips a week to medical, wellness and nutrition appointments regardless of income, scheduled at (732) 431-7448. Note the limit before you rely on it: riders must be able to get in and out of the vehicle with minimal assistance, and the service cannot accommodate wheelchairs. That gap is one of the most common reasons Monmouth families end up calling us.
• Municipal senior centers, which are genuinely active here: Freehold Township at 116 Jackson Mills Road, Manalapan at 211 Freehold Road, Marlboro at 1996 Recreation Way, Middletown at Croydon Hall on Leonardville Road in Leonardo, Red Bank at 80 Shrewsbury Avenue, Atlantic Highlands at 3 Simon Lake Drive, Long Branch at 85 Second Avenue, Hazlet at 1776 Union Avenue.

Getting a parent back through the door of one of those senior centers after an illness is a legitimate care-plan goal, not a nicety. Companion care is often what makes it happen.

Always Responsive Home Care staffs 54 ZIP codes across 45 Monmouth County communities out of the Freehold office: Allenhurst, Allentown, Atlantic Highlands, Avon-by-the-Sea, Belmar, Bradley Beach, Brielle, Cliffwood, Colts Neck, Cream Ridge, Deal, Eatontown, Englishtown, Freehold, Hazlet, Highlands, Holmdel, Howell Township, Interlaken, Keansburg, Lincroft, Little Silver, Long Branch, Manalapan Township, Manasquan, Marlboro Township, Matawan, Middletown Township, Millstone, Monmouth Beach, Morganville, Neptune City, Ocean Grove, Ocean Township, Oceanport, Perrineville, Red Bank, Roosevelt, Rumson, Sea Girt, Tinton Falls, Union Beach, Upper Freehold, Wall Township, West Long Branch.

Not sure which ZIP you fall in? The Monmouth County service areas page breaks the county down region by region.

The same care is available in every one of them: personal care, hourly care, overnight care, live-in care, Alzheimer’s and dementia care, Parkinson’s care, specialized and complex care, and palliative support.

Medicare and traditional health insurance do not generally pay for non-medical home care. Most Monmouth County families pay privately or draw on a long-term care policy — we accept those policies and handle the claims paperwork ourselves. The details are on our payment options page, and you can reach a person any hour at (732) 201-4141.