Directors of nursing, human resource staff, and administrators of nursing homes can learn about how to reduce turnover at a free technical assistance webinar on September 25.

Experts including long-term care consultants Barbara Frank and David Farrell, Marguerite McLaughlin of Quality Partners of Rhode Island, and more will discuss the variables affecting recruitment and retention and describe a variety of interventions and best management practices that can improve retention. Among the presenters is Doug Motter of Homestead Village in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who will talk about how staff has been affected by the culture change process his facility is going through, which includes implementing the coaching model of supervision.

The Staff Stability webinar is the last in a series of three webinars offered by the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes campaign. The others focused on reducing restraints and assessing resident satisfaction.

Details and registration information (pdf)

Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org

Gathering the Evidence that Makes Progress Possible

This is the third in a series of PHI Expert Interviews, which bring you insights from four senior PHI staff. They’re an impressive group – among the nation’s leading experts on long-term care’s direct-care workforce – and collectively they’ve spent decades studying the challenges facing the workforce and how to address them. We think you’ll be interested in what they’ve learned.

Marcia Mayfield, PHI’s director of evaluation, helps PHI document its successes for policymakers, employers, funders, and anyone else who needs to know what works and what doesn’t. As she explains it, her evaluation team does three things:

• Helps PHI learn from what it has done, to make its work more effective;
• Documents PHI’s work and measures its impact, “both for our own purposes and to share what we’ve learned with others in the field”; and
• Develops evaluation tools and approaches for use by anyone interested in improving direct-care jobs. For example, providers can use a business investment calculator due out this fall to calculate their turnover costs, comparing that figure to the cost of various retention or culture change initiatives.

Hired last year by PHI  after 12 years as an evaluator for an international women’s  health organization, Marcia says her goal at PHI is “to demonstrate in a measurable way that what we’re doing works. We essentially have to make the business case for the initiatives we’re promoting.”

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AARP has published responses from Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to a series of questions about long-term care, health care reform, and other issues affecting older Americans. The three discussed in the long-term care section are:

1. Increasing consumer choice and control for people needing long-term care;
2. Improving standards and incentives for quality care; and
3. Providing family caregiving initiatives, such as respite.

AARP routinely surveys presidential and state-level candidates to let its members know where the candidates stand. In addition to submitting a written response, the candidates may check a box indicating whether they support or oppose the proposed public policy initiative. A third box shows AARP’s position. McCain provided narrative responses to the questions but didn’t check any of the boxes. Obama checked the boxes as well, aligning with AARP’s position on all three of the long-term care questions.

AARP’s 38 million members are a potent political force. They tend to pay close attention to issues that affect them, and they vote in big numbers.

Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org