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

Union County is 105 square miles and, by the Census Bureau's 2025 estimate, 601,863 people, roughly 15.6 percent of them aged 65 or over. It is also two counties in one. The eastern half, running from Elizabeth and Hillside down through Linden and Rahway to the Arthur Kill, is dense, urban and largely flat. The western half climbs: the Watchung Mountains cross the northwestern corner, and the county's high ground, around 560 feet, is in Berkeley Heights, and the 1,945-acre Watchung Reservation spreads across Summit, Mountainside, Berkeley Heights, Scotch Plains and Springfield.

That split changes what home care looks like. A caregiver in a Bayway two-family house is working three flights up with no elevator. A caregiver in a Westfield or Summit colonial is managing a staircase, a basement laundry and a driveway that ices over. A caregiver in a Plainfield Victorian is doing both at once. This is why we do not sell one package.

We serve Berkeley Heights, Clark, Cranford, Elizabeth, Elizabethport, Fanwood, Garwood, Hillside, Kenilworth, Linden, Mountainside, New Providence, Plainfield, Rahway, Roselle, Roselle Park, Scotch Plains, Springfield, Summit, Union, Vauxhall, Westfield. Our office is at 20 Jackson Drive in Cranford, in the middle of the county, and the service areas page lists every ZIP code we cover.

Families searching for home health care in Union County are usually looking for one of two different things, and the distinction decides who pays.

Home health care is skilled clinical work ordered by a doctor and delivered by a certified home health agency: nursing visits, wound care, injections, physical or occupational therapy. It is often time-limited and often covered, at least in part, by Medicare.

Home care, which is what we provide, is the non-medical support that fills the other 160-odd hours of the week: bathing and dressing, meals, medication reminders on your family's instructions, help getting safely from a bed to a bathroom, companionship, and someone awake in the house overnight. It is not usually covered by Medicare, and it is what most families actually run out of when a parent comes home.

Plenty of Union County households need both at once, and the two work fine side by side. If you are not sure which one you are looking at, our guide to home health care versus home care lays it out, or you can call and we will tell you which one your situation calls for, even when the answer is not us.

Most of our calls follow a discharge, so it helps to know the county's map. New Jersey designates three stroke centers in Union County, and between them they cover most of what happens to older residents here.

• Overlook Medical Center, 99 Beauvoir Avenue, Summit. Part of Atlantic Health System, the county's state-designated Comprehensive Stroke Center and the first hospital in New Jersey certified by The Joint Commission as an Advanced Comprehensive Stroke Center. It also runs a satellite emergency department in Union that handles roughly 40,000 cases a year.
• Trinitas Regional Medical Center, 225 Williamson Street, Elizabeth. An RWJBarnabas Health hospital and a state-designated Primary Stroke Center, treating around 70,000 emergency patients a year in the county seat.
• Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Rahway, 865 Stone Street, Rahway. An acute-care community hospital since 1917 and a state-designated Primary Stroke Center, with a wound care center and a fitness center in Scotch Plains offering physical and aquatic therapy to recovering patients.
• JFK Muhlenberg Satellite Emergency Department, 1200 Randolph Road, Plainfield. Plainfield's emergency room, on the campus of the former Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center, which closed in 2008. Inpatient admissions from Plainfield generally go out of town.

The first days back from any of those are the ones that go wrong. Hospital-to-home care covers exactly that window: transfers, medication reminders, meals, and a person in the house when the family caregiver finally has to sleep.

There is public support in Union County that families routinely miss, and we would rather you use it than overspend with us.

• Union County Division on Aging, 10 Elizabethtown Plaza in Elizabeth, 908-527-4870. The county's designated Area Agency on Aging and the lead agency for the Aging and Disability Resource Connection, with bilingual staff. It handles benefits screening, home-delivered meals, senior nutrition sites, legal services and caregiver support.
• Union County Paratransit, 908-241-8300. Curb-to-curb rides for residents aged 60 and over, residents 18 and over with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged residents, at three dollars a one-way trip, plus veterans' transport to the VA in East Orange and Lyons. Book five to seven days ahead; dialysis and chemotherapy trips get priority.
• Town senior centers. Elizabeth alone runs four through its Office on Aging, and the Plainfield Senior Citizens Center at 400 East Front Street hosts Union County Senior Nutrition Program lunches. For a senior living alone, that lunch is often the most reliable social contact in a week.

Paratransit needs days of notice, which is precisely why it cannot cover a discharge that lands this afternoon or an appointment that got moved. That gap, and the hours nobody else is in the house, is the honest case for hiring a caregiver.

We are a private-pay, non-medical agency. Care is scheduled as hourly visits, overnight shifts, or live-in and 24-hour support, and changed as needs change.

• Personal care: bathing, dressing, grooming and toileting, with dignity intact.
• Companion care: for the parent who is coping but spending far too many days alone.
• Alzheimer's and dementia care: structure, familiar routine and safety for memory loss.
• Parkinson's care and mobility care: safe transfers, fall prevention and help moving through the house.
• Palliative support and specialized complex care: alongside a clinical team, never instead of one.

What we do not do is skilled nursing, and we will tell you when that is what your family needs. On money: private pay, every long-term care insurance policy accepted with the claim handled by us, secure electronic funds transfer or credit card, no deposits, no long-term contracts, no cancellation penalties. The payment options page has the detail.