What Does CHIO Do for Your Family Member?
CHIO might be a good option for a family member with developmental disabilities or other challenges. It helps to understand what CHIO does and what those services do to give your family member real results. Identifying goals before starting with CHIO helps to ensure that your family member is truly getting the assistance that she needs so that she can move forward toward even bigger goals.
Habilitation Is Focused on Building Skills
Habilitation itself focuses on teaching your family member essential skills that she’ll need to live as independently as possible. Those skills can cover a lot of ground and meet a variety of different goals. Community Based Individual Habilitation, or CHIO, works one-on-one with your family member to assist with either introducing or improving habilitation skills.
CHIO Helps to Improve Natural Supports
Improving daily living skills along with socialization, communication skills, and other skills necessary for community living helps to improve your family member’s natural support system. This is a way for her to experience the support that she needs in keeping up with self-care as well as motor and sensory development. Your family member can then build on those skills as she learns more complicated skills and aims for even bigger goals.
Community Living Is Just One of Many Vital Skills
Part of living in a community involves being able to stay in contact with family members and friends, and CHIO can help your family member learn how to do that more regularly. It can also help your family member to learn how to maintain skills involved in:
- Public events
- Leisure events
- Enjoying hobbies
- Volunteering
All of these are crucial in assisting your family member to communicate with others and get the support that she needs.
Understanding How to Self-advocate Is Also Part of CHIO
Part of self-care involves learning how to self-advocate. Your family member may have had you and other supporters over the years, but it’s possible that now is time for her to become more involved in advocating for her needs when necessary. As your family member develops certain skills, accommodations will become more obvious. Your family member can start to learn how to ensure that she’s getting the accommodations that she needs.
CHIO assistance may be something that can help your family member to meet a variety of different goals. As she meets her initial goals, new ones often show up as the next most important need.
If you are considering community habilitation in Avon, IN, please call the caring staff at RSI Cares. Serving Greater Indianapolis Area. Call for Immediate Info & Assistance: 317-471-0750.
As a practicing Registered Nurse, Etelka was keenly aware of a void in quality patient care that could be provided in the home. She embarked upon a journey to develop a home health care agency that would exceed all expectations and become a trusted partner to physicians and patients.
A Distinguished Career From Nurse to Director of Nursing to President of Home Services Unlimited
Etelka’s distinguished career followed a logical progression to her position as President of Home Services Unlimited. She graduated as a nurse practitioner with a Bachelor of Nursing (RN) in 1972 from Meshgorya University in the Ukraine, close to where she lived with her family. She married her husband Phil in 1973 and decided in 1977 that they would relocate to the United States to be closer to family and to come to this land of opportunity. With an eagerness to continue her budding career, Etelka sat for and passed her Boards in the U.S. in 1979.
A Love and Talent for Working with the Elderly
Etelka began her nursing career in the U.S. at Colonial Crest, now part of Golden Living, where shewasthe In-service Coordinator, the Director of Training and Education and Director of Nursing, a position she occupied for several years.
With a group of partners, she co-founded Adept Corporation, which operated group homes for the mentally challenged. The business was successful and in 1996, Etelka sold her share to return to her roots, caring for the elderly.
In January of 1997, Etelka opened Home Services Unlimited as a fully licensed business to provide home health care. In her quest to learn to do better for her patients, she had already obtained a Masters in Healthcare Administration (MHA) in May of 1990 from the College of St. Francis. As President of Home Services Unlimited, Inc., Etelka guides the trusted, experienced care model Home Services Unlimited uses to continue providing excellent home health care.
Giving Back to the Community of Indianapolis
Volunteering for community services is a high priority for Etelka. Her memberships include the Indiana Association of Rehabilitation Facilities, Executive Women in Health Care and the Indiana Association for Home and Hospice Care, where she is a member of the Board of Directors.
Etelka has also served on the Board of Directors with Hooverwood Home, a highly regarded geriatric facility, since 1997 and as the President for 2005-2006. Through her community work, she has received several awards and accolades, including the Nora McFarland award in 2002, from the Indiana Association of Home and Hospice Care.
Etelka was honored as a “Health Care Hero” by the Indianapolis Business Journal. The issue can be read online here:
http://mags.ibj.com/activemagazine/welcome/html/ibjhch.html.
After clicking on the link, then click on the image of the issue’s front page. After that, you can browse through the issue or click in a box near the top of your internet browser to adjust the page to 17, which is where Etelka’s article appears.
- NOTICE: Indiana Direct Service Workforce Investment Grant - January 30, 2023
- Take a Break and Let Respite Care Aides Help Out - November 10, 2021
- Let Residential Habilitation Services Bring Independence to Your Child With Down Syndrome - October 20, 2021