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’
“If I had only one sentence, this would be it: Direct support work is a highly skilled job,” says Amy Hewitt.
“It’s not viewed that way by society - or, frankly, by many employers - but not everybody can do this job. You have to be smart; you have to be able to problem solve; you have to be flexible and a quick thinker. You also need patience and empathy and creativity. We’re not going to get anywhere in terms of policy advocacy or getting the supports we need in place without clearly articulating that this is a highly skilled job.”
Hewitt is a senior research associate at the University of Minnesota’s Research and Training Center on Community Living. The center’s mission is to support community living for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities - and that has led to a focus on strengthening and supporting the direct support workforce.
Continue reading ‘Amy Hewitt: Direct Support Work is a Highly Skilled Job’
“My passion for working with people with dementia, for making life better for them, has been my major motivating factor. But over time, I keep saying to myself: ‘It’s the direct-care worker, stupid,’” says Joanne Rader. “The only way to make the lives of people with dementia better is to improve the working lives of the direct-care workers. We need to put the things in place that let them provide relationship-based care.”
Now a consultant, Rader has helped pioneer key advances in reducing the use of restraints and finding conflict-free ways of bathing in long-term care. The co-author of Individualized Dementia Care: Creative, Compassionate Approaches and Bathing Without a Battle, which won Book of the Year awards from the American Journal of Nursing in 1996 and 2002, she is one of the founders of the Pioneer Network.
She learned to appreciate the contributions made by direct-care workers early in her career. “I’ve always had a tremendous amount of respect for the work they do, and also for the informal power they have. I might have had the best solution in the world, but if I didn’t have their buy-in, it wasn’t going to get anywhere.” Continue reading ‘Joanne Rader: “It’s the Direct-Care Worker, Stupid”’
“Most of the people that get into this work are women, and they have kids,” says Patti Green of her fellow direct-care workers. “A lot of them are single. They need to earn a decent hourly rate of pay, and they need to have health insurance.”
“That would attract more people, and then if they had the good screening and training we could weed out those that don’t really have a heart for it.”
“They listened to me - I was kind of surprised”
A natural leader, Green has become an expert on the state of direct-care work in America by running what amount to online break rooms for direct-care workers. Nursing Assistant Resources on the Web, the blog she started 10 years ago and now runs with the help of two other direct-care workers, is a trove of free articles, thoughtful blog posts, FAQs, and useful links. And at NursingAssistant@yahoogroups.com, the online community Green launched around the same time and still moderates, 750-plus members engage in a lively exchange of ideas, asking questions, venting frustrations, and offering each other affirmation and support.
Continue reading ‘Patti Green: We Have to Learn to Speak Up’
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