A new American Health Care Association (AHCA) paper presents more than 100 strategies that are designed to improve staff satisfaction among long-term care workers, including direct-care staff, in nursing homes.
The strategies — which combine “actions, practices, and programs,” according to the paper’s authors — are wide-ranging in scope. They encompass everything from maintaining a timely performance-review schedule to keeping the nursing home facility clean and clutter-free.
Many of the strategies emphasize the role of respect in the workplace. For example, the paper (pdf) suggests that nursing home leaders create a comfortable, home-like environment for their workers; praise and publicly recognize their hardest-working staff members, particularly those who go above and beyond their job descriptions; and be as transparent as possible, sharing any relevant evaluative, clinical, and financial data with their staff.
The 100+ strategies have been organized by the authors into seven categories. Each category represents a “key area” that nursing home administrators should be working hard to address. The categories were determined by survey responses drawn from nearly 225,000 nursing home employees.
Listed in order of descending importance, the seven key areas state that nursing home administrators should demonstrate that they:
- Care about their employees’ work-related needs;
- Listen to their employees;
- Are actively working to reduce their employees’ stress;
- Are committed to consistently fair performance evaluations;
- Are committed to treating residents with respect;
- Are committed to safety; and
- Care about staff members as people.
My InnerView, a company that collects survey data for providers and consumers of long-term care, supplied the information AHCA used to compile the list of key areas. My InnerView used data gleaned from surveys it conducted in 2008.
