Chronic Disease Education Makes Aides Better Caregivers
Kenyon HomeCare Consulting • March 16, 2021
Chronic disease education for aides is crucial to the success of your healthcare organization. When aides receive advanced training, they become better employees and, most importantly, better caregivers. Your clients trust you to care for them to the best of your ability, which means employing a group of elite aides who have the knowledge necessary to provide superior services.
Learning Through Chronic Disease Education
Knowledge and experience are your best friends when it comes to creating well-qualified caregivers. Chronic disease education provides both, so your aides can exceed your clients’ expectations. Here are several examples of the knowledge gained with advanced training:
Condition Worsening Signs and Symptoms. When caregivers know what changes to look for based on each client’s specific condition, they can report these indicators to a supervisor or doctor before the client’s quality of life is affected.
Medication knowledge. Aides need to know how the medications their client’s are taking work within the body, the possible side effects, and what adverse reactions to watch for and report.
Additional treatments. With education, caregivers learn treatment options other than medications for specific illnesses, including exercises and dietary restrictions.
Ongoing Monitoring. Most chronic conditions require ongoing monitoring to be certain medications and treatments are effective. With advanced education, caregivers learn about the testing process, possible complications and how to answer potential client questions.
Specialized Care. Care giving techniques are unique for each chronic disease, and the best caregivers are aware of these differences. Educated aides provide the specific, specialized care these clients need and expect.
Signs of Emergency. Chronic disease emergencies, such as bleeding caused by blood-thinning medications, shortness of breath or a repeat stroke, can occur at anytime. Knowledgeable aides are aware of possible emergency situations and are trained how to respond.
Real-life Experiences. Chronic disease education provides client case scenarios, preparing aides to be ready for similar real-life experiences.
Benefits of Chronic Disease Education
The knowledge provided with advanced education leads to numerous benefits for your employees, as well as for your organization. Here are a few of the ways chronic disease education is beneficial:
Prevention of Client Distress. Observant aides aware of potentials symptoms changes, can report faster to their supervisors, before the client becomes panicked.
Prevention of Hospitalization. Knowing warning signs of disease complications, adverse condition changes, medication reactions and side effects allows caregivers to take action before the situation escalates into a trip to the hospital.
Improvement of Client Quality of Life. More caregiver knowledge leads to better all-around care, which improves your client’s quality of life and satisfaction with your organization.
Set Your Organization Apart. Not all healthcare organizations are aware of chronic disease education or employ aides with the ability to provide specialized care. Doing so puts you ahead of your competition.
Enhancement of Employee Satisfaction. When giving your aides the chance to increase their knowledge and improve their work performance, you increase confidence in their abilities. This leads to happier employees, which leads to improved employee retention.
Through chronic disease education, aides become elite caregivers, providing specialized services that keep clients happy and healthy. Additionally, it leads to more satisfied employees. There’s no better way to ensure the success of your health care organization than by facilitating the happiness of both clients and employees.
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Today, this article will look at little different than out typical articles. We all know the costs of losing employees and trying to hire and train new ones. It is exhausting and expensive. So, we think about our wages and benefit packages all the time. What can we do differently that makes people stay? We can’t change the job and we don’t want to keep people that don’t like the work itself. So, how do we acknowledge employees in a way that is valuable to them and that our businesses can afford to do? 5 Things To Consider About Employee Recognition At Your Christmas Party: 1. Years of Service: These can be based on milestone work anniversaries (5, 10, 15 yrs, etc.). If a person has been at your agency 11 years, you pull them up and acknowledge them in the group of employees who have been there at least 10 years up until the time they hit the 15 years landmark. This way longevity is recognized yearly. 2. Special Employee awards: Now, this may be difficult if your staff is very small, but acknowledge the employee who has gone the extra mile in the job they do. Tell the story. The employee needs to know when the employer is proud of the work that has been done. Consider a plaque or certificate. Don’t minimize the value of the employee having them to display. 3. Acknowledge all employees in the mix: Because we are a clinical industry, the administrative staff is often overlooked on day-to-day operations. Ultimately, don’t miss the chance to acknowledge the employee who was able to catch billing errors or collect on a large account. Staff doesn’t like to hear about money, but those types of collections keep Christmas bonuses in place! So, make sure the other staff knows the accomplishments of the finance department or the office manager that every caller loves to speak to. Don't ever forget the IT staff that is on call more than any clinical person in your agency! 4. Letters from the administration: Add a personal note to your staff either collectively or individually depending on the size of your agency. If you are larger, there are employees you don’t often see or get to talk to on a regular basis, so take the time so send a note with that Christmas bonus. 5. Consider the Christmas bonus: Listen, some of you can afford to do substantial monetary bonuses and that is fantastic. However, if you are not in that position, consider something in its place. Maybe small gas cards go with the letter from administration. With the cost of groceries, consider something that helps with the costs of daily living for employees. Big box gift cards in your area will always be used. You may do a lot of these things on a yearly basis to employees. All this being said, it doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons for acknowledgement throughout the year. However, your annual Christmas party is a good way to do it collectively. Between your annual party, write the individual cards to employees when you hear a patient interaction worthy of praise. Or, maybe you buy a gas card for the employee who has picked up extra shifts and always shows up on time. Ultimately, employees will feel valued. You will not regret the time, effort, and energy put into these efforts. Merry Christmas! If you want help with recruitment and retention strategies for your agency, please call Kenyon Homecare Consulting at 206-721-5091 or contact us online today.
When you think in practical terms, what does your ICD 10 coding mean to the clinicians in your agency? It probably isn't as important as you would like. Realistically, your nursing staff cares about hands on patient care. If you want the code itself to be more meaningful, then you need to attach the concepts of patient care to the ICD coding. You may think the code itself goes hand-in-hand with the care, but this is not always true. As a clinician, there are concepts within the nursing care plan that are automatic and some that are instinctual based upon the body system causing the need for care. It's a given that medication, diet, and disease process teaching are going to be in the care plan (or should be). When you get to disease process, our experience shows the clinician doesn't always run deep into the specifics of the disease when it could lead to valuable interventions being included in care. For example, when clinicians do a care plan related to cardiac disease, are the interventions very broad to include all things related to any type of cardiac disease? If you have a patient with right sided heart failure versus left sided heart failure, how many nurses would assess the patient differently? Would your nurses change the frame of mind to look for distended neck veins or anorexia and nausea if the patient had right sided failure? Would they be in the head space of considering whether the patient's appetite changes are more about just having been in the hospital than about potential venous stasis in the abdomen? The point is that although there are certain interventions that would be the same regardless the type of heart failure, picking up on different symptoms and critically thinking through the cause is often missing in the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day. This is not a judgment on the capabilities of the nurses but more about how our nurses are trained to consider care planning and assessment. We have people for ICD 10 coding now. Most nurses are not in the ICD coding manual looking up their own codes anymore because of the specificity that wasn't the same 25 years ago. So, the nurses go out with an H&P from the hospital or doctors office and develop a care plan. It isn't necessarily with the coding in mind. So, we need to get back to basics when it comes to coding and clinical care. We need to train out staff to look harder at the coding. Our coding departments need to have open communication with clinicians and understand the concepts of care planning to understand if things are missing in the care plans. What about your clinical manager's role? Are these things considered when reviewing care plans? What about your record review process? Are your ICD 10 coders nurses that understand care planning and is it part of the coding process to review the care plan? These are things to consider when you look at your clinical practice as well as your coding solution. At Kenyon Homecare Consulting , we have a comprehensive ICD 10 coding department that can provide education to clinicians, accurate ICD 10 coding, care plan and Oasis review. Call us at 206-721-5091 or contact us online to see if we can help you merge the code with the clinical practice in a way to improve your outcomes and your bottom line. We will offer 5 free recodes to any agency that would like us to check the efficacy of their current coding system or talk about becoming your coding solution.