CCP Homemaker and Personal Care Services in Illinois

What the State Sends Into Your Parent's Home

When the Illinois Community Care Program authorizes home care services, the primary service your parent receives is called "In-Home Service" — delivered by a homemaker from a state-contracted home care agency. This is the backbone of the CCP, covering the daily hands-on assistance that keeps a senior functioning safely at home instead of in a nursing facility.

But the word "homemaker" understates what these workers actually do. The role spans personal care, household support, and safety monitoring — with strict legal limits on what falls outside their scope.

Personal Care Tasks (ADL Assistance)

CCP homemakers provide direct physical assistance with the Activities of Daily Living:

Bathing. Helping your parent in and out of the tub or shower, washing, drying, and ensuring the bathroom is safe during the process. This includes sponge baths for seniors who cannot enter a tub.

Dressing. Selecting weather-appropriate clothing, assisting with buttons, zippers, shoes, and compression stockings. For seniors with limited mobility in one arm (common after stroke), the homemaker adapts dressing techniques.

Grooming. Hair care, shaving, oral hygiene, and ordinary personal-care assistance. Tasks requiring clinical judgment remain outside the homemaker's scope.

Transferring. Helping your parent move between the bed, chair, wheelchair, and toilet. This includes repositioning a bedridden or semi-mobile parent to prevent pressure sores.

Eating assistance. Meal preparation (cooking simple meals, assembling ready-to-eat food), feeding assistance for seniors who cannot self-feed, and monitoring dietary restrictions.

Toileting and continence. Assistance with bathroom transfers, incontinence care (changing briefs, skin cleaning), and emptying bedside commodes.

Household Support Tasks (IADL Assistance)

Beyond personal care, CCP homemakers handle the household tasks your parent can no longer manage independently:

• Light housekeeping (vacuuming, mopping, dusting the living areas your parent uses)
• Laundry (washing, drying, folding, and putting away clothes and linens)
• Grocery shopping and errand running
• Medication reminders (prompting your parent to take pills at the correct time — but not administering medications)
• Accompanying your parent to medical appointments and essential outings

What Homemakers Cannot Do

Illinois licensing law draws a hard line between nonmedical home care and skilled medical services. A CCP homemaker working for a Home Services Agency licensed under 210 ILCS 55 cannot perform any task that requires clinical judgment or a nursing license:

• No medication administration. The homemaker can remind your parent to take pills and hand them the pill bottle. They cannot crush pills, measure liquid medications, fill syringes, or physically place medication in your parent's mouth. That requires a Home Nursing or Home Health agency.
• No wound care. Cleaning and bandaging a wound, applying prescription topical medications, or changing surgical dressings requires a skilled nurse.
• No catheter or tube management. Inserting, removing, or managing urinary catheters, feeding tubes, or IV lines is beyond the homemaker's scope.
• No injections. Insulin, blood thinners, or other injectable medications must be administered by a licensed nurse or the patient themselves.

If your parent needs both homemaker services and skilled nursing care, the two services run on separate tracks — CCP covers the homemaker, and Medicare or Medicaid covers the skilled nursing visits through a separate Home Health Agency.

How Hours Are Allocated

The Care Coordination Unit builds a service plan that distributes your parent's authorized weekly hours across the tasks described above. A typical plan for a parent with moderate impairment might look like:

• Morning visit (1.5 hours): Bathing assistance, dressing, breakfast preparation, medication reminder
• Midday visit (1 hour): Lunch preparation, light housekeeping
• Afternoon visit (1 hour): Laundry, grocery run or errand

That is 3.5 hours per day, five days a week — 17.5 weekly hours. Weekend coverage depends on the authorized service plan and the availability of the contracted agency's staff.

The homemaker follows the approved service plan within the authorized hours. The exact tasks and visit pattern depend on that plan and the agency's arrangements.

Choosing the Right Agency

When CCP services are authorized, the CCU provides a list of contracted home care agencies serving your parent's area. You can choose any agency on the list. Factors to consider:

• Staffing consistency. Will the same homemaker come every day, or will workers rotate? Consistency matters enormously for seniors with dementia or anxiety about strangers in their home.
• Family caregiver option. If a family member wants to be the paid homemaker, confirm that the agency accepts family member employees and can onboard them within a reasonable timeline.
• Language capacity. If your parent is more comfortable communicating in a language other than English, ask whether the agency has workers who speak that language.
• Backup coverage. What happens when the assigned homemaker calls in sick? A reliable agency sends a substitute the same day rather than canceling the visit.

The Illinois home care guide walks through the full CCP intake process, from the DON assessment through agency selection and care plan construction.

See more Illinois guides →