Where Are All The Home Care Staff?? Recruitment And Beyond

As we work with home care agencies all around the country, we hear this cry for caregivers all too often. With the increased aging of the population, this cry is getting louder. While different areas of the country have shortages of nurses and therapists, the largest challenge is hiring home care aide. This class of caregiver is called different names depending on the state and the type of care the employee is providing. Since every state has their own set of rules, the caregiver designation will vary with the state except for CNA which is a federal designation and is required for certain federally funded programs.

There is evidence of a growing need for home care aides, but the biggest challenge is getting the right fit. The CNA schools are turning out multiple graduation classes a year, but many do not read or speak English enough to work in an unsupervised situation, lack the basic skills to provide care for the patient population and do not always have sufficient knowledge to recognize when the client is having issues. Therefore, health related issues are not brought to the attention of the home care agency management staff.

So where do we start? First, you need to assess the clients your home care agency serves and identify the skills and personal attributes that the home care aides will need in order to properly care for them. This includes not only skills and knowledge, but personality traits as well. Once you have identified what is needed to care for your clients, develop a profile of the ideal aide.  To establish the presence of the desired traits, require all applicants to take a knowledge test of caregiving (a 50 question test is available through Kenyon Home Care Consulting) and a hands on skills test (recommended to be administered on-site or through a local nursing home). Once it is determined the applicant has the basic knowledge and skills, require that the applicant take an online personality test to determine the presence of desired personality qualities. (One such test is offered online through Steven Tweed Leading Edge called Caregiver Quality Assurance test).

If you approach hiring using the above process, the home care aides you hire will be superior and provide your clients with the quality of care that you need to protect the clients but your reputation, which helps your business grow. You will also find that 60% to 80% of home care aides that apply will not meet your requirements. If you have had a very lenient process for hiring this may come as a shock to you and a lament from your schedulers that there are not enough aides to meet your demand. In the short term that will be true. However we have found that over time, the stringent process produces a workforce of quality, dedicated and loyal employees that help with your scheduling headaches.

Building a workforce of knowledgeable, skilled, dedicated, loyal and dependable home care aides is the way to the future for home care agencies. Failure to screen and hire for excellence in the home care leads to customer complaints and in some cases litigation. We have provided expert witness services in some cases and when we did an analysis of the root cause of why the agency was sued, it was because of the agency’s failure to hire individuals with the knowledge and understanding needed to adequately care for such a frail population. Additionally, the language barrier present in almost all cases added to complexity of the situation with bad outcomes for the agency, the client, and the home care aide.

We realize that in some situations this will prove to be a difficult process to follow because the demand for services exceeds availability of home care aides. When this is the situation, we moved to plan B, developing our own training school to meet our customer needs.

If you need help with recruitment and retention or building a quality in-house educational program, Kenyon Homecare Consulting is available to help. Call us at 206-721-5091 or contact us online to see how we can help!