Training: Conducting Virtual Home Visits

Will the training address conducting home visits virtually due to the COVID pandemic?

We'd love to hear your experience with providing home visit virtually.  Here are some considerations we came up with:

  1. Using some video chat so the resident can show the parts of the home while home visitor has the checklist and goes through it with them, this means the resident would need a hardcopy or electronic copy of the checklist too.

  2. If multi-family housing (i.e., apartment housing), try to talk to a maintenance staff person to better understand the HVAC and other building systems.

  3. Since more people might be staying home, you might get richer data (e.g., input from school age children, spouses/ partners, grandparents who are now home).

  4. It’s often hard to schedule a home visit, but with the pandemic it might be easier to make phone call appointments. Plus, the call could be split up into multiple calls so it’s not too burdensome on the residents. Perhaps, home assessors could do the core checklist on one phone call, then try the dust mite or mold modules on a separate call.

  5. Might be easier to do follow-up calls in different seasons or just as a follow-up to see if actions items were competed or had any barriers which the home assessor could help address.