Raise public awareness of quality care

I was at a meeting this morning of a community group involved in programs and services for seniors. The first speaker on the agenda was the head of a state agency. The topic was mental health services to seniors. One of the group members asked about services for people living in nursing facilities who might be suffering from depression. The speaker’s response began, “Well, who wouldn’t be depressed living in a place like that.”

That comment – just a reflexive, throw-away line – struck me hard.

Many of us have dedicated our careers to providing quality care for seniors living in “places like that” – nursing facilities and assisted living facilities providing care to elders.

We’ve spent hours training our caregivers to be gentle, loving and compassionate.

We’ve listened to families share their angst at having to move mom or dad from the family home, but having no other choices.

We’ve sat at bedsides – during our time off – reading to a dying resident and sharing tears with families who are grieving the loss of a loved one.

When my own beloved mother-in-law died recently she had lived in the care community less than 2 months. Yet the young man who cared for her most days cried as hard as any member of the family when she died.

Not one of us felt that it was inevitable that she be depressed.

Not one of us ever referred to the care setting as “a place like that.”

And yet so many in the public still have that perception: that a nursing home – and often any care setting – is to be avoided like the plague. It’s the last choice for any person, and be prepared to be very depressed if that’s where you end up living out your days.

We’ve come a long way personalizing care; but we’ve got a long ways to go. We need to continue to show the people in our community – including those running agencies for the benefit of people like our residents and clients – what we do, up close.

We need to continue to shout about the incredible way seniors are cared for, and the options available to them that not only support daily living but also enhance the quality of life for residents.

I feel sad for the speaker this morning if her mother or father should ever need nursing care. But most of all, I see this as a call to action to those of us providing care to let the world around us know that it’s not a depressing place to be. That life, right to the end, can be rich and meaningful, and that it’s our mission to help make it so for the people in our care.

If you’re interested in learning how online training can help you build an extraordinary team, contact us at info@aquiretraining.com. Ask about our “6 months’ free” offer, designed to get you going now, even if the money’s tight.

Census and the economy

From the word on the street, if your census is strong consider yourself lucky.

It’s not enough that the economy and poor housing market is driving people to care for their own family members rather than seek care elsewhere. We’re also caring for a market sector that has other inherent issues, namely longevity. Not to be indelicate, but our residents are vulnerable. And, it seems, we lose them in groups.

My mother in law had excellent end of life care recently in a brand new assisted living community. She was the first person in the apartment, and the caregivers were incredibly kind and attentive. They only had a few residents – how few I don’t really know. What I do know is that on the day my mother-in-law died, two other residents also passed. I’m guessing that may have constituted as much as 25% of their occupancy, in one fell swoop.

In this situation, it’s the small details that count. For our family, the attention to detail was incredible. The staff not only were attentive and caring, they openly grieved with us at the loss of our mother. One of the employees even gave the eulogy at the memorial service – and it was absolutely pitch perfect.

Were we satisfied customer? Absolutely. We’ll tell everyone we can about the fabulous care provided to our family. We’ll tell you what a great company Leisure Care is, and how happy we are with the care provided by their team.

We’ve had other experiences with our family elders. We’ll tell you about those, too – and warn you away from some communities that didn’t meet our basic expectations, let alone exceed them.

Benjamin Pearce, author of the excellent book “Managing Senior Living Communities” and a member of our instructor team just developed a course on Customer Service for managers for CEU credit. Ben says, “Quality is simply the difference between what you expect and what you get. When you get more than you expect, you perceive that you’ve gotten something of value.”

If you feel you or your managers could use a little tuning up in this area, check out this course on our EasyCEU website.

With everything else working against us having a strong census today, customer service is one area we can control and improve.

Developing a training vision for success

Recently the aQuire team was hired as an advisor to a new family caregiver project being developed out of New York City. One of the developers of the project is a man who serves on the board for an East Coast University’s school of business. He tells the story of a recent meeting where the board’s agenda was to “vision the school in 10 years.” My new friend, Barry, begins by raising his hand and saying, “In 10 years we know that most students will take at least a portion of their classes online.”

Barry was met by total silence. After an awkward couple of minutes, one of the school’s administrators said, “Well, that’s an interesting perspective but not really how we prefer to teach.”

Barry responded, appropriately, “It’s not going to matter as much how ‘we prefer to teach’ as it matters how our students prefer to learn. And evidence today shows that most will prefer at least a portion of their training online.”

He is right, you know. It doesn’t really matter how we prefer to teach – it does matter how the people we’re trying to teach prefer to learn.

When it comes to employees and training, one thing is clear: traditional approaches to training are one of the least enjoyable ways our staff prefers to learn.

Imagine if you were required to attend a training session on your day off – or in the middle of the night. For many of our employees that’s exactly what we’re asking them to do to simply attend regularly scheduled inservices. It’s not only a poor choice for many, it’s an ineffective way to ensure that every person, every shift, enterprise-wide is equally trained to deliver quality service – the bedrock of an organization’s survival.

Today, we need to deliver training dynamically, with new information delivered to every single employee in the most efficient, effective way possible. We need to consider, as well, how our employees want to learn, and adapt our training to technology that is rapidly becoming the standard rather than the exception.

We need to grasp the vision for the future as we develop our programs today, or be left behind in a rapidly changing, complex economy.


[Interested in starting an online training program for your company? Contact an aQuire representative today to learn how you can get up to 6 months free when you start your program now.]