Preventative & Fitness Healthcare aims to improve quality care for all ages

If you’re looking for in home health care services, there might not be no better place to look than Preventive & Fitness Healthcare Agency.

Milledgeville native Wylene Worthen founded the agency and is a retired nurse. Worthen spent 36 years working at Central State Hospital. She began her career as a housekeeper with CSH before deciding that she wanted to do more to help people. That led to Worthen to go school to become a registered nurse.

She became a nurse and continued working at CSH until her retirement in 2015. Later she made the choice to start her own health care agency.

Located at 1800 North Ridge Drive Suite 1 in Milledgeville, Preventive & Fitness Healthcare Agency opened its doors in November 2018. The agency is typically open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Preventive & Fitness Healthcare Agency was born out of Worthen’s love for helping others.

“Once I retired, I decided to start my own agency to be able to go out in the community to help people, rather than just in a hospital setting or facility setting,” she said.

The primary focus is on the private home care services. Medicaid clients that are on the CCSP and SOURCE program are accepted. The agency also offers several training programs including CPR training. BLS and Heartsaver instructors who are skilled in training others in CPR and First Aid. Worthen has additionally developed programs to benefit children in the community.

“I’ve realized that children ages 9 to 17 need to know how to do CPR and take care of themselves as well,” she said.

Thus, “I Am My Sibling’s Keeper,” a program for 10- to 17-year-olds that teaches them how to take care of themselves, siblings and sometimes grandparents, was born. The program helps them identify the signs of choking, how to do CPR, and other things related to safety. The “Home Alone Safety Measures” program teaches children skills that they can use when they are home alone, such as how to handle power outages during storms.

Worthen and the agency also offers the “Dynamic Duo” package, which includes both programs specifically for ages 10 to 15. Both programs are available separately for ages 10 to 17 and 9 to 15, respectively.

Preventive & Fitness Healthcare Agency has a goal of “improving quality of health and physical function ability.” Worthen said the hope is to “prolong life and keep people, especially the elderly, from going into a nursing facility or assisted living facility,” which will allow them to stay in their own homes and communities with their families with proper health care.

Worthen wanted to be part of the health care community in Milledgeville, and she was prompted to enter the home health care field after taking care of her late father, who passed away in 2020. Preventive & Fitness Healthcare Agency can currently accommodate four clients, though that number is fluctuating. She also teaches CPR to various organizations within the Milledgeville community.

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