The COVID-19 pandemic has had a forceful impact across the healthcare industry and its workers over the past two years. The strain placed on healthcare systems trickled down to frontline workers, spiking cases of burnout and driving many to exit the care industry. The result is a staffing shortage the likes the home care industry has not seen before.
Just before the pandemic, in February 2020, over 1.5M people were employed in home health services, according to the Petersen-KFF Health System Tracker. Though staffing levels have nearly returned to their pre-pandemic levels, there has been no growth over the last two years. Now the true challenge emerges to address the number of new direct care workers needed in the industry — as many as 7.4M, according to PHI.
Home health and home care providers are hard-pressed to recruit and retain talent to fill these roles and meet today’s care needs. Filling critical healthcare roles to mitigate the ongoing staffing crisis and improve the quality of care delivered starts with offering high-quality educational opportunities. Here’s why:
Quality education as a distinguishing factor
Education is the golden key to unlocking recruitment opportunities within home care and home health. For individuals who lack prior industry experience, the promise of learning the necessary skills builds confidence to enter a new industry and role. The benefits of promised education pathways can help these roles stand out as fruitful career paths to follow, while also improving an individual’s care delivery skills and thus job performance.
Technology, such as online training, is often the first source to take someone as an applicant and provide them with the training required, as well as upskill them with specialized training to help them become a proficient caregiver. Home health nurses, as well as occupational and physical therapists, are frequently on their own to find CEUs to maintain licensure, and because of that, employers who offer educational training and online certificates stand out from others and are more likely to attract health providers — or individuals new to the industry looking for guidance along their career path.
Quality education enables quality care, and by empowering care providers across the healthcare continuum with knowledge and skills, we can drive better patient outcomes by ensuring providers are prepared and confident working with patients.
Creating incentives to reduce staff turnover, halt shortage
Ongoing training, such as the pursuit of CNA certificates, nursing degrees and higher education opportunities for caregivers, can have a meaningful impact and is an untapped opportunity for agencies to materially impact their recruiting and retention efforts, maximize caregivers’ value and improve their career satisfaction. The report, “Education Pathways for Caregivers: An Untapped Opportunity for Employers,” based on a survey of 1,500 caregivers nationwide, showed that 85% of respondents indicated they would be more likely to stay with an agency that offered this support. And further, 94% of caregivers say access to further education is an important consideration in accepting a job offer.
By offering continued education opportunities, home care and home health providers create incentives for their employees to stay in the industry and with their agencies, improving retention and reducing turnover – both of which benefit the broader industry’s ability to meet the care needs of an aging population, and do it well.
With the surge in demand for receiving care at home, we’re at a turning point in our industry’s ability to rise to this challenge — a task that is currently impossible without addressing the staffing crisis. Providers must make decisions to invest in their workforce in order to ensure that they can deliver the utmost quality of care now and in the future. Offering quality education is an impactful way to address the string of interconnected challenges the healthcare industry at large faces in an end-to-end way — from attracting new entrants, to training them to perform well, and encouraging them to stay and grow within the industry. I see this as an investment that is imperative to guarantee the future of healthcare delivery for years to come.
Helen Adeosun is CEO and founder of CareAcademy, an online education platform for home care and home health agencies that delivers video-based classes and real-world scenarios that walk through aspects of the caregiver experience. Adeosun has had a career in driving outcomes for adult learners and has been listed as one of Fortune’s 2020 40 Under 40 in Health.
