Hope at the holidays

At lunch yesterday a colleague of mine commented, “I think 2009 will go down in history as one of the hardest years ever; possibly even harder than the great depression.”

I thought, at first, that this was a massive overstatement, but as she went on to talk about the sheer number of individuals affected, the loss of jobs and homes, I began to agree. It’s been, undeniably, an incredibly hard year for many, many people.

We’re lucky, most of us in the senior care business. We may have faced a declining census or more families reluctant to make the change, but overall, we’ve had a relatively easy time of it. We’ve continued hiring, adding staff and programs while other industries have been shutting doors after decades of service.

As part of a project one of my employees is doing during our own holiday lull, I spent a few minutes this morning reviewing comments our EasyCEU and aQuire clients have made to us over this past year. The comments included many like these:

These are the best on-line course I have completed!

Course content is REALLY useful.

I love the ease of great online courses for completing my CEUs.

I think these online courses are much more valuable than sitting in a classroom for 8 hours!

I have used many vendors for CEUs but I found this one to be the most useful!

I loved doing my EasyCEU course and will take more of these courses in the future.

I love that I can take back what I’ve learned to train my staff in better care.

Our aQuire clients shared comments from their team, including, “I’ve never taken an online course before. I didn’t know I could do it. I learned so much about caring for people.”

Needless to say, these messages affirm our team’s efforts this year and give us the intangible reward of knowing that our work makes a difference.

Often, just a kind word or two has the power to encourage, support; energize. We promise to pay forward what you’ve given us this year in the coming year.

Together, maybe we can make the star of hope shine just a little brighter.

Hope for a better year next year for those who have faced the loss of a home or job.

Hope for a chance to continue to make a difference in the lives of the people we serve and the people who serve with us.

Hope for genuine warmth in our homes and families today and always.

Wishing you and yours all the joys – and the hope – of the season,

Sharon K. Brothers, MSW
President and CEO
EasyCEU and aQuire Training Solutions

Engaged or battened down?

It’s cold – darn cold. And I don’t just mean outside; it’s cold inside, too, in a lot of places.

We’ve been interviewing for an executive level position in our office the past few weeks. We’re talking to great applicants; highly qualified for our work and probably much more. Some of them have been looking for a position for months. When we mentioned to one that we didn’t know if he would be able to work for what we could offer he said, “The answer to that question (without having any idea what you pay) is yes.”

These applicants keep hearing the same story: “We’re hiring at a much lower pay rate this year. We can only afford to pay you about half what you made at your last job.”

Baby, it’s cold out there.

I get it. We just hired a couple of people at a pay level lower than we hired for the same position two years ago. We got highly qualified people, too. They’re happy for work; we’re happy to have them for a price that fits into our super-snug budget.

But I’m going to be watching our budget and making adjustments – fast – the minute it looks like its changing. I don’t want to lose good people. I don’t want to lose the forward progress we’re making in growing our company.

What I really don’t want to see is the senior care business sector get another black eye if the economy improves and we lag behind in taking good care of our employees. We know the words – and the concepts behind them – of employee empowerment, engagement, actualization.

BusinessWeek’s online Debate Room posed the debate earlier this year: “The recession is no time to worry about employee engagement. Pros and cons?”

On the pro side, (Concentrate on the business, not the workers), the commentator remarks, “You’re in this fix because of lack of engagement, right? …The real disease is poor management – and that’s you, bucky…Employee engagement is about having a well-run enterprise based on consistently applied value. Do that, and engagement follows.”

On the CON side, (Con: workers need a morale boost), the commentator notes, “Employee engagement will hit historic lows in the coming years and cost employers billions in lost productivity – and cost consumers in the form of a more frustrating I-don’t-really-care-about-you customer experience…Should you worry about employee engagement? Do the math. What if all employees in your company were engaged and willing to give the company 15 minutes of discretionary effort each week? The ROI would astound you and the improved customer experience just might make the difference between surviving the Great Recession and thriving in it.”

What’s your opinion?

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m just guessing that your actions are demonstrating your opinions clearly to your employees right now.

Holidays and new beginnings

It’s that time of year – the holidays are charging right at us, ready or not.

For me fall, racing headlong into the holidays, seems to blend seamlessly into the wrap up of yet another year. In about one week, it seems, we go from setting our clocks back to raking leaves to decorating (and then all too quickly un-decorating) the house for the holidays.

About the only thing that keeps me grounded this time of year is the knowledge that we’re about to turn a page to a new year. It’s that “clean slate” feeling of starting a new year off fresh, with new opportunities, new challenges, new adventures.

In our office we’ve started the New Year just a little early with the launch of our newest division, a private career school, duly licensed by the Oregon Department of Education with the specific purpose of providing training to individuals looking to enter the field of caring for others. The Institute for Professional Care Education (www.IPCed.com) is the official site for this training, and we’re excited about how quickly this is already taking off.

We’re training people who need to become certified Personal Care Aides to care for a loved one and get insurance reimbursement for the care.

We’re collaborating with a number of partners to offer an enhanced Personal Care Aide (PCA) certification complete with skills training and clinical work experience.

We’re hearing from employers who want to hire these folks, too, as quickly as they are trained.

We’re also working on a new project based out of New York for family caregivers, a huge and growing population of Americans that have unique needs all their own.

New Year; new adventures. It’s my trick to get through the holidays. This week, I’ve got 20 coming to my house for Thanksgiving dinner; I’ll need all the tricks I can get!


Have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family and friends this week! – Sharon Brothers

Change means business end or opportunity

News flash: some nurses are finding it hard to get a job.

What the heck? I thought we had a major nursing shortage, and wouldn’t be able to turn out nurses fast enough to fill the openings.

I wonder if it isn’t a little like 10 years ago, when everyone was talking about the coming baby boomer elder bubble. We built assisted living communities as fast as we could. Many companies didn’t survive, as the baby boomer bubble was still several years in the future and fill rates were long and arduous.

Here’s my prediction for the future: in-home care is going to skyrocket. It will become more affordable and more accessible, but not necessarily of top quality. It will, in fact, represent a real option for families who might have otherwise sought a move to assisted living for a loved one.

Perhaps the next phase of living, following the cocooning in our homes and the “stay-cations” of the recession will be the move up to a larger house on our retirement instead of downsizing – because now we’ve got the folks moving in.

Multi-generational households are the norm rather than the exception in China. “In China it is a great shame to put a parent into a nursing home,” says the author of a recent TIME magazine article (November 23, 2009, “Five things the US can learn from China ”). The author predicts that home care will grow significantly in the near future simply out of necessity, supported by governmental programs that encourage home and family caregiving options.

After a career that spans more than 30 years in long term care, I believe that some things will change…and some things will stay the same.

We’ll have more options, because we’ll demand them, we baby boomers who are rapidly reaching our golden years.

We’ll have more autonomy, more choice and more freedom to create a living environment that works best for us.

We’ll still have providers who do things like they’ve always been done, too. You know the ones: the buildings that haven’t been touched by paint or a construction crew in 40 years, but who happily take all those tough-to-place Medicaid patients.

Will assisted living communities become the nursing home of tomorrow: the place no one wants to go unless they have no other choice; the place where “person-centered care” is a phrase that means “we’re really trying folks, but we can’t operate any differently with the massive layer of regulation we live under?”

No matter what part of the care community you represent, these are interesting times, with many more to come. I don’t think it’ll be as easy as we always thought it would be when the baby boomer bubble finally arrives. I do think that, to succeed and survive, we’ll need to focus on one simple thing: quality.

We’ll need to deliver what the customer wants (Happy hour every night? A gym and sauna on every floor? Book clubs and poker parties?). We’ll need to be bold and interesting, and deliver what we say we will.

We’ll need to be networked socially and virally, and know that every thing we promise (or every mistake we make) can reach millions over the web in seconds.

Nursing shortage? Maybe – or maybe not. What other “truths” will we see change dramatically in the coming years? Stick around – let’s find out.

Training Personal Care Aides to deliver quality care

We’re excited around the aQuire Training offices. We just received our private school license from the Oregon Department of Education to offer the Personal Care Aide Certification course (and some other pre-hire courses) though our newest website identity, the Institute for Professional Care Education (www.IPCed.com).

Why is that so cool? Because with our school license we can now train workers who are job seekers and help prepare a pool of more qualified, trained workers. These individuals may be able to get workforce development funds to pay for their training, too – a clear win/win all the way around.

This matters to you if you hire caregivers. Hiring someone who has invested the time, initiative and money in a comprehensive 40 hour course means you’re hiring someone more likely to succeed and to love their job as a caregiver.

This matters to you if your loved one needs a caregiver. Ensuring that the caregivers providing care to your loved one are comprehensively trained and certified is an important step to feeling confident in the quality of care your loved one is receiving.

This matters to you if you’re focused on building a strong reputation for quality care. Demonstrating training above and beyond the minimum requirements is one way to set your organization ahead of the pack. And being ahead means business success, any way you slice it.

This matters to you if you’re involved in training, too. We are actively working to develop strong training partnerships with others in their training field to help reach as many people as possible.

This is one way we can reach out and improve the standard of care that is delivered, every single day, to people who live and work in our state, our town and our homes.

For details about the comprehensive 40 hour online Personal Care Certification Course see www.IPCed.com. Contact Wendy@aQuiretraining.com for information on pricing advantages for bulk purchases of this Certification Course or to set up a personal web tour of the course.

Employee satisfaction and resident quality of life connected

The hardest job in the world is hiring good managers. Good managers not only set the tone for the entire operation, they help ensure the two keys: compliance and quality.

My InnerView’s recent report published as a supplement to Provider’s October 2009 issue, emphasized this point over and over in the results of their latest surveys on quality care in assisted living. Good managers – managers who care, listen and set clear guidelines – results in greater employee satisfaction and improved resident quality of life.

Not surprisingly, the two outcomes are closely connected, as well. When employee satisfaction is high, resident quality of life increases at the same rate.

Supporting an employee’s career earns high marks as a measure of management strength; at the same time, only 22% of the 12,000 individuals surveyed rated the training provided to them as “excellent” – the weakest of the 4 areas the survey covered.

Nursing and personal care staff had the lowest overall job satisfaction rating, with just over 70% of the individuals in these job descriptions expressing happiness with their job, compared to over 80% of housekeepers and more than 90% of administration who were satisfied with their jobs.

Considering that these are the crucial workers who provide the care delivery to the clients, this is certainly an area for focus and improvement. These are the people who deliver the care, and in turn determine the happiness of clients and families.

Since top consumer issues are the care and competency of staff, this is clearly a management issue.

Caring, listening and building the strongest employee team possible – these are no small challenges that today’s assisted living manager faces. Seems like it’s more important than ever to focus on leadership.

Let’s collaborate

There are two kinds of people in the world: those looking for something to do, and those working harder than ever just trying to keep up with the work on their plate.

Overly simplistic, I know, but lately that’s how it feels to me. Those who aren’t working are desperate for a job and something meaningful to do to fill their day.

Those of us who are working, are somehow busier than ever. We’re not complaining, of course; we’re counting our blessings to be busy and bringing home a paycheck.

At the same time, we’re running a little leaner staff than usual, meaning more work lands on the desks of fewer people (did I mention how busy I am lately?). We’re trying to start new business units, expand our sources of revenue and, of course, figure out how to facebook, twitter, and network the heck out of everything we’re busy doing.

Some of it we’re doing really well. I see companies and organizations that are more innovative, creative and engaged than ever before. They’re launching new programs and adding services. They’re involved in writing grants and getting grants, and in helping others progress forward in this profession.

Every once in a while, though, I see areas where, instead of collaborating, we try to hoard our piece of the market. We duplicate and overlap efforts, resulting in more work; less payoff.

Last week I was in Phoenix and had the opportunity to visit a Catholic Charities center. Just a few years ago they built the Caregiver House, a small home designed to be fully accessible – and designed for teaching people how best to provide care in someone else’s home.

The bathrooms have innovative assistive devices; the bedrooms are equipped with the typical wheelchair, walker and other devices you might find in a home where care is being given someone elderly or disabled. The living room has lots of extra tables and chairs for teaching and presentations.

It’s a beautiful home and a wonderful environment for teaching people to provide care at home. And the best part of all is that the organization opens the House to groups throughout the community to use for their own teaching. They willingly and graciously share their wonderful resource, even though they provide training as a big part of their own program.

We’re all trying to do just a little more with just a little less these days. I suggest that maybe it’s time for us all to look for ways to collaborate rather than compete just a little more often.

Last week I came home excited and energized by the prospect of working in collaboration with others, instead of exhausted and burdened by the load on my own desk.

It’s a great feeling. Can we collaborate, and lighten your load a bit today?