Savvy Senior Shopper CEO and Owner, Katasha Smart, started a personalized senior assisting service to assist the elderly in Baltimore in their homes with everyday tasks.
“When seniors get to a certain age they can’t thrive as well in a nursing home,” Smart told the AFRO. “When they live somewhere all their lives and get accustomed, then taken out of it, they can’t function well. People don’t take care of seniors especially if they don’t have people coming to visiting them everyday.”
Katasha Smart, CEO of Savvy Senior Shopper, handles the tasks that
home health care aides don’t. (Courtesy Photo)
Starting in 2008, Savvy Senior Shopper offered a limited amount of services for seniors who needed things done, such as getting prescriptions, groceries and feeding pets.
Smart started the business after her own experience of helping her grandmother.
“My grandmother drove my passion to do this. When I was young she went to a nursing home and my mom had to work so we couldn’t leave my grandma home,” Smart said. “I would ask my grandmother if I could go out to outside and play and my mother would come home and my grandmother wouldn’t remember letting me go outside.”
Handling the day to day operations from her home, the business currently is a nightly and weekend service. Three people, including Smart, handle tasks for the elderly.
Smart said if any senior needed things done during the day, they have a designated person to handle those tasks such as document handling and Maryland Vehicle Administration services (MVA).
Smart and her team do not do any medical operations in the home as they are not licensed to do so. Smart is looking for ways to expand their services because she see the needs for so much more.
Smart said it is hard to move seniors from point A to point B. Therefore she would like Savvy Senior Shopper to have dedicated, “A door to door man to maneuver them in and out of their house, into a vehicle, to their destination, out of the car into and getting them to their place and back.”
Local Baltimore resident Phyllis Price, 53, said her family used the service when they needed it. “My aunt and uncles used it for a year and a half,” Price said. “They needed it to do things such as getting groceries and getting medication for his prosthetic leg. These were things that my cousin couldn’t do when my aunt and uncle were alive.
Price said the service filled a need. I’ve told my friends that need it for their mother’s, aunt or friends that could use it.It is a wonderful service.”
For more information go to savvyseniorshopper.com.