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.