Retaining Staff During Difficult Times
A recent article in McKnight's Long-Term Care News highlighted a successful leadership program that demonstrated positive results in staff retention. The program, funded through Civil Monetary Penalties (CMP), showed a decrease in direct care staff turnover and an increase in resident and family satisfaction.
Currently, LeadingAge NY ProCare conducts two comprehensive programs that are very similar to what is described in the McKnight's article. The programs, described below, focus on nurse leadership and communication and have helped participating nursing homes to make improvements that resulted in retaining existing staff and enhancing staff-to-staff and staff-to-resident communication.
Growing Strong Roots creates an effective, replicable, and sustainable peer mentoring program for the new Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) that encourages both retention and commitment to explicit values of long term care.
The goals of the program are as follows:
- Improve retention rate;
- Refocus the orientation process to concentrate on demonstrating exemplary caregiving in actual practice;
- Reinforce critical skills and behaviors;
- Teach a culture of caring;
- Support new staff to become part of the team; and
- Provide recognition and a potential career ladder for experienced nurse aides.
Pathways to Leadership is designed to enable facilities to enhance residents’ quality of care and quality of life by improving the preparation and retention of long term care nurses and nursing assistants through utilization of a peer mentoring process.
Peer mentoring is a process by which an experienced charge nurse acquaints a novice or new charge nurse with the customs, resources, and values of the nursing home. The emphasis is on how the customs, resources, and values of an organization can be transmitted through strong leadership, management, and communication skills in a way that also promotes retention of charge nurses and the CNAs they supervise.
The goals of the program are to:
- Improve care by improving management, leadership, and communication skills, especially as they relate to dementia care;
- Teach positive skills related to managing in a long term care unit;
- Improve retention of nursing staff;
- Create a caring community between staff and residents; and
- Sustain the intervention over time.
Contact: Elliott Frost, efrost@leadingageny.org, 518-441-8761