Caregivers and support staff are the lifeblood of the long-term care industry. These hard-working members of the care delivery team allow safer, more efficient, and more equitable treatment of nursing home residents. Attracting top talent is only one part of the staffing puzzle for facility managers; helping staff develop crucial skills and traits is another. Just as nursing home insurance helps to protect against operational and liability risks, successful nursing home staff use key traits to help the facility to provide superior care for residents.
Leadership in Nursing Home Operations
Tomorrow’s leaders are moving up the ranks today in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. These future leaders are gaining valuable skills that will help them to achieve success. To help tomorrow’s leaders grow, care managers and facility owners must establish an environment where education and training are a priority. This serves as a powerful risk management tool as well, supplementing the protections of nursing home insurance. By engaging a facility’s caregivers through educational opportunities, those staff members tend to remain in place, cutting down on staffing shortages while producing a superior workforce.
Three Characteristics of a Care Leader
Leadership takes many forms, and there are numerous styles of leader to be found across industries. In healthcare, particularly delivery of care to residents of nursing homes, three key characteristics of a successful leader stand out:
- Holistic thinking
- Ability to Multitask
- Critical Thinking
Holistic thinking is the approach of evaluating the entire operation and how each component fits together to produce a desired outcome. This is sometimes referred to as “systems thinking” and helps an organization run more efficiently. Identifying problems or issues, then developing correction plans around the factors leading to those issues is the key to solving them.
Successful caregivers know that they have many demands placed on them. The ability to be able to juggle differing demands – multitasking – is a critical skill. Those who are able to multitask stand out against their peers, and because of this, they have the potential to achieve success in their roles.
Critical thinking relies on the collection and analysis of information in order to make decisions. Evidentiary-based decision making is a key contributor to an organization’s success. By leveraging data and evidence, caregivers are able to take approaches that strengthen the team’s care delivery model while slashing inefficiencies.
Communication Skills Lead to Success
In any organization, the ability of team members to facilitate and support communication is of the utmost importance. In long-term healthcare, a team works together to deliver care, with individual staff members providing different facets of that care. Being able to communicate clearly with other staff, with residents, and with leaders helps to eliminate risks. When caregivers can convey critical information, they add to the protection afforded by nursing home insurance; the facility, residents, and staff all benefit from this communication. Nursing home managers must adopt approaches that facilitate communication, including:
- Robust and flexible reporting tools.
- Frequent staff meetings.
- Training on developing communication skills.
- Staff surveys to collect feedback.
Communication plays a large role in the long-term care industry. When staff members are able to be heard – even if they have concerns about workplace hazards or inefficiencies – they become more invested in the success of the organization. Nursing home insurance is not the only risk management approach that can protect facilities; communication between staff members and leadership builds resilient, focused, and efficient workforces on the road to long-term success.
About Caitlin Morgan
Caitlin Morgan specializes in insuring assisted living facilities and nursing homes and can assist you in providing insurance and risk management services for this niche market. Give us a call to learn more about our programs at (877) 226-1027.