A tracked recovery
Home Care After Hip Replacement Surgery
A hip is a planned repair with a known schedule, so the help around it should be scheduled too.
Endurance Home Care provides home care after hip replacement from its Stamford, CT office: personal care, homemaking, transportation, and medication reminders arranged by the hour around your surgeon's recovery plan.
A repair the system keeps count of
A hip replacement is one of the few recoveries the health system counts out loud. Medicare's Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program tracks 30-day unplanned readmissions after elective primary total hip or knee arthroplasty, one of six conditions and procedures it measures that way. The surgery has a plan attached, a follow-up calendar, and a window everyone is watching.
The hospital measures those 30 days. A household lives them, in ordinary rooms, on ordinary mornings, mostly without anybody in uniform present. That is the part families are unprepared for: not the operation, which is scheduled and staffed, but the plain daily work waiting on the other side of the front door once the discharge paperwork is signed and the car pulls away.
The hip has a schedule. This page is about giving the help around it one too, hour by hour, named service by named service, so the weeks after surgery are arranged rather than improvised. It is the hip-specific version of transitional care after a hospital stay.
Medicare, plainly
What Medicare covers, and what it does not
Two rules decide most of the budget after a hip replacement, and it is better to read them now than to meet them on an invoice six weeks from now.
The first rule is about aide hours. Medicare covers part-time or intermittent home health aide care only if the person is also getting skilled nursing care, physical therapy, speech-language pathology services, or occupational therapy. The aide hours ride along with skilled care. They are not a benefit that stands on its own once the skilled visits end.
The second rule is about the daily work. Medicare does not pay for custodial or personal care, meaning help with bathing, dressing, or using the bathroom, when that is the only care a person needs. Which is very often exactly what a household needs in week two: not a clinician, just hands.
Generally covered
The skilled side. Nursing visits, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, and the aide hours attached to them while they run.
Generally not covered
The daily side, standing alone. Bathing, dressing, the bathroom, meals, the house, and the driving, when no skilled care is running alongside them.
Put together, the therapy and the nursing are the covered part of a hip recovery, and the hours in between them usually are not. Nobody is hiding this. It is simply how the benefit is written, and knowing it on the day of discharge changes the plan while the plan can still be changed. Endurance Home Care provides care at home in Connecticut and New Jersey, with companion care only in New York. Skilled nursing, home health aides and physical therapy in Connecticut are provided by Endurance Home Health.
The daily help itself
The therapist's work belongs to the therapist. What a caregiver carries is everything the day is made of around it, and at Endurance each of those pieces is a named service you can book rather than a vague promise of support.
Personal Care
Bathing and dressing
The two jobs a household notices first, because they arrive before breakfast and they cannot be postponed. A caregiver is there for them, hands on, at whatever hour the morning actually starts.
Personal Care
Moving safely from room to room
Stairs, thresholds, the trip to the bathroom at two in the morning. Somebody steady within reach turns the riskiest minutes of the day into ordinary ones.
Homemaking
Meals, and the kitchen after them
Cooking is standing, carrying, and reaching, and all three are harder for a while. Meals get made, plated, and cleared without the household negotiating who does it.
Homemaking
Laundry and the ordinary upkeep
Beds changed, laundry run, the floor kept clear of everything a walker can catch. A house that stays tidy is a house that stays easier to move around in.
Transportation
Rides to follow-up and therapy visits
The appointments are fixed and the driving is not optional. A caregiver drives, comes in for the visit when that is wanted, and folds the trip into the day's hours.
Medication Reminders
Medication reminders
A caregiver reminds, and only reminds. Nothing is administered, measured, or changed by anyone at Endurance. The prescriptions belong to the prescriber and the pharmacy.
Chalking the weeks
There is no fixed term and we will not invent one. The discharge plan and the surgeon's follow-ups set the pace of a recovery. What the slate below rules is the other thing, the caregiver hours, and it shows only the shape those hours usually take.
The heaviest block
The first stretch home takes the most hours: the morning routine end to end, the evening again, and cover through the parts of the day nobody wants to face alone.
The appointment weeks
Hours reshape around follow-up and therapy visits, with the ride and the waiting room built into the block instead of bolted onto it.
The taper
Hours come down as the routine holds. Week by week, by agreement, rather than against a term somebody committed to on day one.
Hourly Care is one of the four types of care Endurance offers in Connecticut and New Jersey; New York service is companion care only. It is the model this shape asks for: blocks bought where they are needed, moved when the appointment calendar moves. For budgeting, the Long Term Care Navigator 2026 Connecticut figures puts the Connecticut median at $37 to $42 an hour for home care and $35 an hour for a home health aide. Those are market medians for the state, not Endurance rates. Ours are quoted on the call, from your dates and your hours.
Connecticut License HCA.0002450 · New Jersey License HP0435100 · Connecticut DPH License 9915786 (Endurance Home Health). Hospital-to-home care serves Connecticut and New Jersey; New York service is companion care only.
How care starts
If the surgery is still ahead
Arrange it before the discharge date
A scheduled surgery gives you the rarest thing in this whole process, which is lead time. Use it. Work through our hospital discharge checklist for elderly parents while the date is still on the calendar.
If they are already home
Start with the days in front of you
The opening stretch is its own problem, and it does not wait for a tidy plan. Read what the first 72 hours home look like and call while you read it.
Both branches meet in the same place. One call to the Client Support Line, then a registered nurse conducts the assessment in the home, because a registered nurse conducts every Endurance client assessment. Then a caregiver is matched to the household and the schedule is yours to set and to change. Families tend to remember the nurse visit as the moment the week stopped feeling improvised.
Questions families ask after hip surgery
What help do you need at home after a hip replacement?
The first weeks call for hands, not just visits: help bathing and dressing while movement is restricted, meals cooked and cleaned up, rides to follow-up and therapy appointments, medication reminders, and someone steady nearby on stairs and bathroom trips. Skilled therapy handles the exercises. Home caregivers carry everything around them, hour by hour, until the routine holds on its own.
How long is home care needed after hip surgery?
There is no fixed term, and we do not pretend there is one. The discharge plan and the surgeon's follow-ups set the pace. Hourly Care exists exactly for this shape of need: heavier hours the first weeks, tapering as strength and confidence return. Adjust week by week rather than committing to a guess on day one.
Can a caregiver drive my parent to physical therapy?
Yes. Transportation is one of Endurance's listed services. A caregiver can drive to therapy and follow-up appointments, come in for the visit when wanted, and fold the trip into the day's care, so appointments never depend on a scramble for rides.
The weeks are already ruled. The hours are what you get to chalk in.
Home care across Fairfield and New Haven counties, Connecticut, from a state registered agency.
Call (203) 936-6847