All The Education in The World Doesn’t Matter Without Processes In Place That Keep It From Failing
Kenyon HomeCare Consulting • March 3, 2021
You provide chronic disease education to staff. Your agency prides itself in the education offered or provided directly to clinicians. Where you struggle is in seeing the outcomes you desire both financially and clinically come to fruition. Today, let’s consider where are programs are missing the mark to make a true difference.
4 Common Problems With Current Chronic Disease Education:
Many times, the approach to chronic disease education is the biggest hindrance to success. The information provided to staff may be fantastic, but there is no follow through on putting it into practice on a meaningful and routine basis. Let’s look at 4 problems we often see when consulting with agencies:
Teaching Is Not Home Health Specific: This is big. Without showing how the care works within the industry, it becomes signs and symptoms to memorize and report. Although this information is obviously important, the teaching needs be approached with how it is going to be practically utilized in the field.
Teaching Is Too Discipline Specific: This may sound strange considering disciplines have different scopes of practice. It somewhat ties into the teaching not being home health specific. The disciplines need to see how it all works together. We often see chronic disease teaching to aide staff that is very basic. It often dismisses the critical thinking ability and role the home health aide plays in success of the care plan. The teaching also often pulls therapy disciplines out of the mix. This is a mistake.
There Is No Process In Place After The Education: This is critical to moving your program forward. Once all disciplines have been through the training, the agency needs internal processes that address the items in the learning process as part of a true coordinated care planning process. This means the communication between disciplines needs to change. For example: If the aide is involved with a patient with chronic disease, the nurse needs specific interventions assigned to the aide that address the chronic disease. Then, there should be guidelines each week for that aide to help advance the goals of the care plan. Most times, the aide is responsible for a bath and this is where it ends. Unless the patient is in major distress, things aren’t reported back to the nurse. It isn’t a lack of the ability of the home health aide, it is a lack of the formal process along with the education and coordinated care planning that fails here.
Agency Does Not Make It An Ongoing Focus: If you spend the time and money on the education to your clinicians and the agency, then it needs to be a part of your CQI program. You need to make adjustments that lead to ongoing improvement in coordinated care planning and patient outcomes. If you are still putting all the eggs of chronic care in the nursing basket, then your program will cost you more money. Your outcomes will not be as good and patient care will not be as comprehensive without making a lot more visits than necessary. Utilizing everyone to the fullest extent of scope makes patient care better. It is a process to provide effective coordinated care planning, so it will take time.
Are You Missing The Forest For The Trees?
If you realize that your chronic disease management lacks some or all of the items listed above, then join Kenyon Homecare Consulting for our free webinar on March 24th, 2021. In Don’t Miss The Forest For the Trees In Your Educational Program Or You Will Lose Time And Money, we discuss how to make chronic disease education effective for the clinician, your agency, and set you above the rest with referral sources. Register today! Should you find yourself in need to help implement a program, please call us at 206-721-5091 or contact us online.
Results Based Consulting
Did you find value in this blog post? Imagine what we can do for your home care or hospice agency. Fill out the form below to see how we're leading the industry with innovation, affordability, and experience.
Contact Us
Managing compliance in the home care, home health, and hospice world is a challenge. Let's look at what it takes. It is necessary to be methodical and intentional.
Significant reductions is federal Medicaid funding has a huge impact to our nation's healthcare system to the tune of $911 billion over 10 years.
Somewhere in the mix of trying to improve patient care, the patients can get lost. The drive to to move to true patient centered care.
Quality of care issues present a range of challenges related to providing effective and safe care in a patient's home.
Infection Control breaches remain a problem in the home care industry. These are preventable errors for your surveys and in everyday practice.
Recruiting home care staff is challenging and costly, losing and replacing staff is worse. You also must consider lost opportunity costs.
One of the biggest challenges for home care and home health is the recruitment of staff to provide care. The high cost remains an issue for recruitment strategies.
There has been a growing issue with the supply of nurses and home care aides. This is particularly true for home care agencies. With the increased competition from hospitals, skilled nursing homes, Medicare home health and hospices for these workers, it has become increasingly difficult to recruit and hire.
HOPE Question and Answer Repository
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.