Compassionate 24/7 Caregivers Serving Ponte Vedra and the First Coast

Always Responsive Home Care of Ponte Vedra is a non-medical home care agency for older adults in 28 ZIP codes across three counties: St. Johns, Duval and Flagler. Our office is in Nocatee Town Center at 205 Marketside Avenue, Suite 200, Ponte Vedra, FL 32081. It is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and the phone is answered around the clock at (904) 204-2046.

Every town we serve has a page of its own with more local detail. In St. Johns County they are Ponte Vedra and Nocatee, Ponte Vedra Beach, St. Johns (Fruit Cove and Julington Creek), St. Augustine (from the historic city out to World Golf Village and Palencia), St. Augustine Beach on Anastasia Island, and the farm country around Elkton and Hastings. In Duval County we serve the Beaches (Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach) and two Jacksonville ZIP codes: 32224, home to Mayo Clinic and the University of North Florida, and 32256, around Baymeadows and Deerwood. We do not cover the rest of the city. Across the St. Johns River we serve Fleming Island. Farther south, Flagler County takes in Palm Coast, Bunnell, the county seat, and Flagler Beach, and past them we serve Ormond Beach and Pierson. To check a specific street address, see our Ponte Vedra service areas or give the office a call.

Who lives here changes from one end of that map to the other. By the Census Bureau’s 2020–2024 American Community Survey estimates, the median age in Flagler County is 53.1, 31 percent of its residents are 65 or older, and just over half of its households include someone that age. St. Johns County is younger, with a median age of 44.2 and about one resident in five 65 or older, and Duval County younger again at 36.9. Ages vary inside a county, too: Ponte Vedra Beach, ZIP 32082, matches Flagler’s median age of 53.1, and about 1,880 of its residents 65 and older live alone. In both St. Johns and Flagler counties, roughly one in four residents 75 and older report serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs. For many families that is where home care starts: a parent who still runs most of the day and needs a hand with the parts that have turned risky, such as the shower, the stairs or the drive to an appointment.

A hospital stay in our area can end at any of several hospitals. At the north end, Mayo Clinic in Florida is on San Pablo Road in ZIP 32224, and Baptist Medical Center Beaches in Jacksonville Beach describes its emergency department as the only hospital-based, 24-hour emergency service at the beach. From our office in Nocatee, in free-flowing traffic, Ascension St. Vincent’s St. Johns County, which opened in July 2022 near I-95 and County Road 210 and is a Primary Stroke Center with a 24/7 emergency room, is about 14 minutes away; Baptist Medical Center South, a 381-bed hospital on Old St. Augustine Road, is about 17; Mayo Clinic is about 28; and UF Health Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine, the 335-bed hospital that became part of UF Health in 2023, is about 36. HCA also runs freestanding emergency rooms in Julington Creek and in St. Augustine, where it opened one in February 2026. In Flagler County, AdventHealth Palm Coast on Memorial Medical Parkway was the only hospital until AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway opened in August 2023 with 100 beds, about eight miles to the north.

Many recoveries pass through rehab before they reach the house. Brooks Rehabilitation runs a 170-bed rehabilitation hospital in Jacksonville’s San Souci neighborhood and a 60-bed hospital in the Bartram area off I-95, and closer to Ormond Beach and Pierson, it runs an inpatient rehabilitation center with Halifax Health in Daytona Beach. Vicar’s Landing in Ponte Vedra Beach offers skilled nursing care alongside independent living, assisted living and memory care. For the doctor visits that follow, Baptist Health’s AgeWell Center for Health, a primary care practice for people 65 and older, has centers in Nocatee and Neptune Beach; the Nocatee center on Nocatee Village Drive lists geriatric assessment, care coordination, medication management and memory disorder care among its services.

Wherever the stay ends, the trip back to the house tends to come with new prescriptions, a walker and a list of follow-up appointments. Our hospital-to-home care is built for that stretch: a caregiver at the house when your parent arrives, the bedroom and bathroom set up for safer moving around, meals and medication reminders kept on schedule, and rides to the follow-up visits. We work alongside any home health nurse or therapist the hospital has arranged, so the care at home follows the discharge plan.

Every ZIP code we serve falls within ElderSource, the state-designated Area Agency on Aging and Aging and Disability Resource Center for Northeast Florida, and it is the place to start for publicly funded help, including the eligibility process for Florida’s Statewide Medicaid Managed Care Long-Term Care Program. Its HelpLine is 1-888-242-4464. An intake specialist schedules a telephone screening, and people who qualify go onto a waitlist where their place depends on how frail they are and on the funding available. Private care can carry a household through the wait. Each county also has its own provider for senior centers and local programs: the St. Johns County Council on Aging, the City of Jacksonville’s Senior Services Division in Duval, and Flagler County Senior Services.

In St. Johns County, home to our office, the Council on Aging has served older adults since 1974, and every one of its centers is inside our area: River House and the Coastal Community Center in St. Augustine, the Hastings Center, the Trout Creek Center in Orangedale, and two in Ponte Vedra Beach. THE PLAYERS Community Senior Center on Landrum Lane is open Tuesday through Friday, with lunch, chair exercise, Tai Chi, bridge, canasta and a putting green, and the Ponte Vedra Memory Care Center on A1A North runs the council’s IMEP memory program in three- and five-hour sessions. The council’s Meals on Wheels offers subsidized meals for people who qualify, private-pay meals and short-term deliveries, and its caregiver and dementia support programs start with a call to (904) 209-3700. When memory loss is part of the picture, our Alzheimer’s and dementia care works alongside programs like these rather than in place of them.

Getting there is its own problem. The Sunshine Bus, St. Johns County’s public transit, runs its routes around St. Augustine and stops no farther north than Palencia, so it does not reach Ponte Vedra or Nocatee. The Council on Aging offers demand-response rides for people over 60 and for residents who are transportation-disadvantaged, and THE PLAYERS center has a transportation request form, but for a parent who has stopped driving, a weekly bridge game or a standing appointment on San Pablo Road can quietly drop away. Companion care is often how those come back, with a caregiver who drives, comes along and makes an afternoon out possible again.

Hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30, and storms here are not only a beach problem. When Hurricane Matthew passed offshore in October 2016, the National Hurricane Center reported major to extreme beach erosion from Flagler Beach to Mickler’s Landing in St. Johns County, with dune lines cut back 30 to 40 feet. A1A washed out in numerous places along the Flagler County coast, the end of the Flagler Beach pier came down, water rose as high as 4 feet above the ground in the city of St. Augustine, and several gauges along the St. Johns River measured their highest water levels on record. In November 2022, Nicole washed out State Road A1A in South Ponte Vedra Beach, and residents who tried to evacuate were stranded. When Milton crossed the state in October 2024, St. Johns County recorded gusts up to 70 mph at the Ponte Vedra Fire Station and 9 to 15 inches of rain, with flooding in Hastings and Flagler Estates.

Each county draws its own evacuation zones, so look up your parent’s street address on the evacuation information page of their county, whether that is St. Johns, Duval or Flagler, before a storm is named rather than going by the neighborhood. For people who would need help in an evacuation or a shelter because of a physical, mental, cognitive or sensory disability, Florida keeps a special needs registry. Under state law it is maintained with each county’s emergency management office, which must link to the registration form from its website and uses the registry to plan for the people on it. Registering does not guarantee a place in a shelter, so sign up well before the season’s first storm and ask the county what its shelter can and cannot support.

None of this replaces the county’s plan, but caregivers can do much of the groundwork with a household: going through the medication list so refills are not left to the last minute, packing a bag with prescriptions, glasses, hearing aid batteries and copies of insurance cards, keeping phones and medical equipment batteries charged, and helping the family fill in the registration. Well before a storm, we also talk through who will be with your parent if the household leaves and how everyone will stay in touch. Those steps go into the written plan from the free in-home assessment, so they are settled in June rather than worked out once a storm has a name.

Care can start small and grow. Hourly care covers the hours that have become hard, often mornings and appointments. Overnight care adds an awake caregiver when nights are the worry, and live-in care or around-the-clock shifts follow when being alone is no longer safe. Within any schedule, the work can include personal care, mobility care, Parkinson’s care, palliative care and specialized complex care for several conditions at once. Every option is described on our home care services in Ponte Vedra page.

We are a private-pay, non-medical agency. We accept long-term care insurance and handle the claims for you, and we do not bill Medicare or Medicaid. There is no deposit, no long-term contract and no cancellation penalty, and you are billed only for care that has been delivered. If your parent holds a long-term care policy, it is worth asking whether it qualifies under Florida’s Long-Term Care Partnership Program, which protects assets dollar for dollar if the policyholder later applies for Medicaid. Our payment options page has the details.

Every caregiver we send is screened, background-checked, insured and trained, and the office has a registered nurse on staff for the clinical questions that come with a new diagnosis or a change in medications. Care starts with a free in-home assessment: we visit the house, meet your parent, look for fall risks room by room, and put a care plan and an estimate in writing before the first shift. Read more about our Ponte Vedra team, call (904) 204-2046, or send us a message.