Tapping the Power of Peer Mentoring
This is the second 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.
Peggy Powell is one of the founders of Cooperative Home Care Associates, the worker-owned home health agency that started PHI, where she served as director of education. Since joining PHI in 1991, she has worked with CHCA and other employers to develop strategies for recruiting, training, supervising, and supporting direct-care staff.
One of those strategies, peer mentoring, is gaining in popularity – and no wonder. Done right, a peer mentor program helps new direct-care workers get oriented to the job and the organization, bolstering their skills and their confidence. It also creates a career ladder for experienced workers.
And that’s not all, as Peggy has learned. Continue reading ‘PHI EXPERT INTERVIEW: Peggy Powell’
Over the next month, the PHI Expert Interview series will 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.
The One Thing You Need to Make Culture Change Work
Sue Misiorski, PHI’s Director of Organizational Culture Change, has been making nursing homes better places to live and work for more than 20 years. A registered nurse, she started her career as a CNA and later became a director of nursing and vice president of nursing for an innovative nursing home chain.
Sue is also one of the pioneers of the Pioneer Network, the people behind the concept of culture change. She was president of the Pioneer Network for three years, and she wrote its handbook on how to implement culture change: Getting Started: A pioneering approach to culture change in long-term care organizations.
The Pioneers have worked hard to keep the concept of “culture change” flexible. They say that it’s a journey, not a destination, and that it can start almost anywhere. In keeping with that philosophy, Sue and her PHI colleagues start with an organizational assessment when they work with an employer, learning about that particular organization’s needs and goals rather than trying to impose a cookie-cutter solution.
But Sue has learned that one thing must be in place before an organization can embark on its culture change journey. Continue reading ‘PHI EXPERT INTERVIEW: Sue Misiorski’
When long-term care opinion leaders were surveyed about the challenges facing our long-term care delivery and financing system, the challenge they named most often was the workforce.
The first national survey of what long-term care experts think about the state of long-term care in the U.S.A. and how it can be reformed tallied the responses of 1,147 people (44.5 percent of those polled) to an online questionnaire. According to The Commonwealth Fund Long-Term Care Opinion Leader Survey: Top-Level Findings, (pdf), a one-page summary of its findings, the survey was intended to “help move the LTC reform debate forward,” as we cannot afford to wait any longer to prepare for the coming baby boomer age wave.
Continue reading ‘Opinion Leaders Rank Workforce Top Among LTC Challenges’
“The residents come to know you better and trust you,” says a CNA of the changes a nursing home experienced after implementing consistent assignment.
The new system also benefits the home’s direct-care workers, according to a one-page report (pdf) by the Iowa Foundation for Medical Care, the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for Iowa. “The staff have ownership and they are loving it,” says Assistant Administrator Deb Pascoe. Staff chose the neighborhoods they wanted to work in and divided resident caseloads.
The report describes an initiative by Wyndcrest Nursing Home in Clinton, Iowa, which piloted the change on one shift for several months before introducing it on others. “It’s important to remember that change takes time,” Pascoe explains. “Pilot testing provided us with an opportunity to work through problems before implementing it facility-wide.”
Continue reading ‘Iowa Residents, CNAs Reap the Benefits of Consistent Assignment’
“There’s really no mystery here,” says PHI President Steven Dawson in an interview about solving the staffing problem in long-term care. “It’s a matter of providing a living wage, healthcare coverage, support, and recognition of what these workers do and providing the training they need to do the job well. It’s a matter of political will.”
“The fundamental problem has to do with the industry’s current basic business model of low-investment, high-turnover,” Dawson adds. “It’s based on the assumption that there’s a virtually endless supply of these workers, but I believe that the era of an endless supply of labor is coming to an end…. The approach to dealing with this new era will instead have to be “high-investment” on several fronts.”
The interview was conducted by Richard Peck, editor of Long-Term Living magazine, for the magazine’s website.
Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org
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