Stop me if you have heard this one before. Senior care is suffering an unprecedented staffing crisis, and it’s not getting better no matter what leadership tries… 

Yes, you have heard this before, and it has been a familiar tune for far too many years. In my 25+ year career in the field, I have been hearing it and trying to help solve it the entire time. In fact, I have devoted most of my career to it. And I’m not the only one — there are many brilliant minds trying to do the same thing with little lasting progress. 

I have to ask why we are still having this problem. 

I saw a post on LinkedIn recently that suggested something similar to the title of this article. It is what many of us have been saying all along, and yet it isn’t penetrating our actions. 

I asked a couple of caregivers the other day about their experience and perspectives as a CNA and a newer RN. The CNA had been in our industry for five years, and the nurse for two. 

They mentioned several difficulties we all know:

1. The work is extremely hard and taxing.

2. They can get paid more doing another job elsewhere. 

3. The regulatory process makes their jobs even more difficult. 

4. It’s hard to lose residents they have grown close to. 

Then, I asked them why they stayed in the field. Caring for older people was their calling, and they couldn’t imagine doing anything else. That hit me hard, even though I have heard it before. 

It’s the reason I work in the field. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that is why you are here, too. How many other industries have this level of dedication to their target customer, going as far as mentioning that it is their life’s calling? Not many. 

As we chatted, I asked them why they thought turnover was so high. Some of those answers included: 

1. They never felt fully trained or prepared to deal with the situations they were thrown into. 

2. Facility leadership is too busy doing their own job to step back and truly listen to their problems — much less do anything about them. 

3. They never feel like they know what is going on in the building or the industry because things change too quickly. 

4. They often feel disrespected and treated like “just another caregiver” by leadership and owners of the company they work for. 

5. They work with people from different cultures, and no one is taught how to understand each other and work in harmony. 

6. They mentioned that if you could make it beyond 90 days without other staff members running you off, you had a good chance of sticking with it. 

Trainers, associations and the best companies are all working on this. The effort is fantastic. But the work isn’t trickling down to the people who are our most important asset.

If I spend too much time thinking about this, my stomach hurts. This is a true leadership problem and it happens at the company or facility level. 

Why aren’t we flipping the script and asking ourselves these questions:

1. How can we train our caregivers to deal with difficult situations in caring for older people? How do we prepare them to deal with resident-to-staff aggression, gut-wrenching diagnoses that they have never encountered before, how to communicate with empathy, etc.? 

2. How do we provide supervisors with enough training, support, coaching, and, most importantly, the commodity of time so they can be successful? And how can we incentivize leadership to retain the best employees? 

3. What communication systems can we put in place to ensure that our entire company knows what is happening in our buildings and understands what factors are affecting their individual jobs? 

4. How can we go beyond traditional reward systems to give employees a red-carpet experience in their jobs for their careers with the company? 

5. How do we restructure our HR and operations systems, including recruitment, onboarding, staff development and retention efforts, so that they become part of the fabric of our operations — no matter who is in charge? 

6. How can we create employee ambassadors who will do our recruiting for us by word of mouth? 

I’m a realist. I understand that this is extremely hard, given the environment we have to work in. I’m also a dreamer and visionary who sees a different path for our future. 

Those in leadership positions — you who are reading this — are the key to this alternate future. It will require hard work, new partnerships, and a completely different thought pattern to get there. 

The best revolutions are hard and they are so worth it. No one is going to come in and save us — we have to do the work. And since we didn’t do it before, we HAVE to do it now. If not for us, for our children when they ultimately need these services. 

Dana Weaver is the CEO/Founder of Weaver Solutions LLC.

The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.

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