Check out the newest additions to PHI’s National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce:

Increasing staff retention – A fact sheet from the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes campaign.

The interplay of CNAs’ views of residents and nursing home environments – Identifies CNAs’ perspectives of nursing home residents and how these perspectives translate into care practices.

Growing your staff – Reports on several nursing homes’ efforts to address the nursing and direct-care workforce shortages.

An information-based approach to staff efficiency – This article advocates reorganization of workflow and realignment of workload to address retention and attendance problems in nursing homes.

PHI’s National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce is a national online library for people in search of solutions to the direct-care staffing crisis in long-term care. It houses  over 800 articles, reports, issue briefs, and fact sheets on the direct-care workforce.

The July issue of The Gerontologist featured the results of the Better Jobs Better Care initiative, the four-year $15.5 million research and demonstration project that was the largest initiative in the nation ever created to address the high vacancy and turnover rates of direct-care workers by improving the quality of direct-care jobs. Read the full story

Details and registration information

PHI’s Health Care for Health Care Workers (HCHCW) campaign invites direct-care workers and their allies in Pennsylvania to a conference on October 3. Conference registration is open through September 19. Exhibitor registrations will be accepted through September 12 or until exhibit space is sold out.

Empowering Our Future will bring together an emerging network of workers, worker-advocates, and others concerned about the future of long-term care in Pennsylvania. Workshops and activities for personal care attendants, nursing assistants, and other direct-care workers will cover a range of topics, including:

• Working with clients with dementia;
• Resolving conflicts;
• Managing your personal finances; and
• Communicating effectively with policymakers

“The conference is a rare opportunity to develop leadership skills, become an effective advocate for change in long-term care settings, and discuss the issues confronting the long-term care system with your peers,” says Tracy Lawless, Pennsylvania State Campaign Coordinator for HCHCW.

It also gives organizations that support or employ direct-care workers a chance to reach them through exhibiting or advertising in the brochure.

Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org

The final report’s executive summary
A research brief outlining the study’s findings (pdf)
The implementation manual (pdf)

Home health agencies that want to improve staff retention and client outcomes will find some unexpected results and useful lessons in a report recently posted to the US HHS/ASPE Office of Disability, Aging and Long-Term Care Policy website.

Home Health Aide (HHA) Partnering Collaborative Evaluation: Final Report (pdf) assesses the impact of an effort to truly incorporate home health aides into care teams. The initiative was implemented in 2003 by the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) and several of its licensed agency partners.

“It’s working because the aides feel more involved in the team, and they appreciate that,” says Daisy Diaz, supervising coordinator for Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), one of the participating agencies. “They work hard, and it’s good for them to get acknowledged.”

It’s also good for the agency and its clients to get more regular and immediate input from the aides, Diaz adds. “They call us right away now to let us know about any issues with the patients. They also call the nurse.” Read the full story

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.”

Read the full story