Private Duty Nurse vs. Home Health Aide vs. Home Health Agency: What's the Difference?

The short answer: a home health aide helps with daily living — bathing, dressing, meals, companionship — but is not a nurse and cannot perform clinical care. A home health agency (in the Medicare sense) delivers physician-ordered, insurance-billed care to patients who meet strict eligibility rules. A private duty nurse is a licensed nurse you hire directly, for the care you want, when you want it, paid out of pocket. NW Private Nurse Partners is a licensed Illinois Home Nursing Agency providing that third kind of care: registered nurses, booked by the visit, no referral required.

Families searching for help at home run into all three terms — often used interchangeably, and often incorrectly. Since choosing the wrong one wastes weeks, here's what each actually is.

Home Health Aide (or Caregiver / CNA)

A home health aide or certified nursing assistant provides non-medical support: help with bathing, dressing, toileting, meal preparation, light housekeeping, transportation, and companionship. For someone who needs hands-on help through the day, aides are indispensable, and hiring one for multi-hour shifts is often the right call.

What an aide cannot do is clinical care. Aides are not licensed nurses: they cannot assess a wound, change a sterile dressing, give an injection, manage a catheter, interpret vital signs, or make a nursing judgment about whether a symptom needs a doctor. When a family hires an aide expecting those things, everyone ends up frustrated.

Medicare-Certified Home Health Agency

"Home health," in the formal sense, means intermittent skilled care delivered by a Medicare-certified home health agency under a physician's plan of care. It's a valuable benefit — and a narrow one. To qualify, a patient generally must be under a doctor's order, need intermittent skilled care, and be homebound. Visits follow the approved plan, the schedule follows the agency's availability, and the episode ends when the insurance-defined goals are met — not necessarily when the family feels ready.

If your physician has ordered home health and you qualify, use it. The gaps appear when you don't qualify, when the episode ends but the need doesn't, or when you simply want more nursing attention than the plan allows.

Private Duty Nurse

Private duty nursing means hiring a licensed nurse directly and paying privately. No physician order, no homebound requirement, no coverage review — the patient or family decides what care is needed and schedules it. Traditionally, private duty nursing has been sold in shifts (a nurse in the home for many hours at a time), which is why quoted costs can be intimidating.

NW Private Nurse Partners works on a per-visit model instead: a registered nurse comes for a focused one-hour visit — a wellness assessment, wound care, an injection, a post-hospital check — at a flat price with travel included. You can book a single visit or a recurring schedule, and you'll see the same nurse whenever possible. Exact prices are in how much a home nurse visit costs in Illinois.

How NW Private Nurse Partners Is Licensed

Northwest Private Nurse Partners LLC is a licensed Illinois Home Nursing Agency (IDPH License No. 4001014) — a distinct license category from a Medicare-certified home health agency, regulated by the Illinois Department of Public Health. Every caregiver we send is a licensed registered nurse, background checked, and we'll provide any nurse's license number on request. We serve 47 communities across Cook, Lake, DuPage and McHenry counties — see the service area.

Which One Does Your Family Need?

• Daily help with bathing, meals, and supervision → a home health aide or caregiver agency.
• Physician-ordered recovery care after a qualifying hospital stay, and the patient is homebound → Medicare-certified home health, arranged through the doctor or discharge planner.
• Clinical nursing care on your own terms — a skilled assessment for an aging parent, wound care after surgery, medication review, ongoing chronic-condition monitoring — → a private duty nurse.

These options also combine well. Many of our patients have an aide handling daily support while an NW Private Nurse Partners nurse visits weekly or monthly for clinical monitoring. Others finish a Medicare home health episode and continue with private nursing visits so the clinical oversight doesn't stop the day the paperwork does. (Not sure the moment has come at all? Start with when should you consider home nursing.)

"Half of my first phone calls start with a family that spent two weeks talking to the wrong kind of provider. Once you know the three categories, the right door is usually obvious."
— Sue Volpe, RN

Still not sure which category fits your situation? Call (224) 506-8600 — we'll tell you honestly, including when the answer is "you want an aide agency or your doctor's home health referral, not us."