The senior care industry can’t hire its way out of the current worker crisis, a panel of industry experts said Tuesday during a McKnight’s panel discussion.
“There is not enough staff to go around,” Eric Scharber, managing partner at healthcare consulting firm SimiTree said during “Workforce Hurdles and Solutions Across the Long-term Care Continuum,” which was part of a McKnight’s Online Forum. “There will be winners and losers. The difference between the winners and losers are the organizations that can build a really great culture.”
The panel of experts from staffing, home care and senior care companies said the labor shortage was a problem long before the COVID-19 pandemic but has gotten worse over the last two years due to worker burnout from the virus. The loss of frontline staff has increased pressures on leadership positions, panelists explained. With the competition for talent so intense across multiple industries, the panel said long-term care providers need to focus first on retaining employees.
‘Train up’
Parker Wells, vice president and co-founder of Care to Stay Home, based in Santa Ana, CA, said agencies must “train up” and promote workers to higher positions.
“Every organization needs to take an internal pulse to figure out what programs and opportunities they are providing their staff,” Wells said.
Timothy Keck, vice president of network development and government relations at Mission Health Communities, talked about an innovative personal time off program his firm is launching later this year as a way to keep nurses on staff.
“We are looking at PTO-your-way or unlimited PTO,” Keck said. “If they do what they’re supposed to do and get their work done, they can take whatever time off that they want.”
Nurses are the most in-demand workers across most care settings and surveys indicate they could be the toughest to keep and recruit. A recent poll of 2,500 workers found one-third plan to quit their jobs this year, while a survey last summer found hospitals were ratcheting up their recruitment of clinical talent, including nurses.
Turnover at the top
Home care, senior care and senior living communities could also face a revolving door in the corner office. Allison Gilgenbach, senior consultant with post-acute care and senior living human capital management platform OnShift, said to date there hasn’t been much turnover at the top but admitted “2022 might look really different for those positions, unless [companies] have developed some sort of retention strategy.”
Scharber said the demand for leaders is already there. In fact, he said his firm has seen it increase approximately 200% in the past year.
“There is a lot of capital looking to be deployed,” Scharer explained. “Private equity and venture capital want to come into this space and to do that you need good leadership.”
He also emphasized that as important as culture is, so are wages. One outdated idea is that pay doesn’t matter; it absolutely does, he said.
