Long-Term Care Staffing Near a Breaking Point
Health care is fraught with challenges, especially since the pandemic culminated in the “quiet quit” and the “Great Resignation.” Perhaps no other industry has been hit as hard with staffing shortages, frequent turnover, and burnout. And within health care, the long term care segment appears to be nearing a breaking point. After decades of trying to stabilize staffing and avoid agency usage, the industry is finding itself reliant on temporary employees to keep shifts staffed and, even then, not at the levels that CMS has tried to mandate.
Cascadia Has Won Three Gold Awards
During these turbulent times, one might expect that a focus on performance excellence is put off to the side while dealing with the crisis du jour. But nothing could be further from the truth for two recent recipients of the AHCA/NCAL Quality Award Program’s highest level of achievement, the Gold Award. In 2023, two Cascadia centers were recognized with the Gold Award: Aspen Park of Cascadia (Moscow, Idaho) and Lewiston Transitional Care of Cascadia (Lewiston, Idaho). They joined a sister center, Mountain Valley of Cascadia (Kellogg, Idaho), that won its second Gold Award in 2022. Is Cascadia on to something?
Make Performance Excellence Fun
We spoke recently with Maryruth Butler, MBA, LNHA and Director of Quality and Integrity for Cascadia Healthcare. She was the nursing home administrator when Mountain Valley won its first Gold Award in 2011 and when it won the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2016 – to date, the only nursing home in the country to win the Baldrige Award! We asked her how leaders at Cascadia ventured on a performance excellence journey in the midst of such difficult times. She said, “I encourage leaders to get their teams on board and to break the process up into little pieces. Make it fun. It also helps that Mountain Valley has served as a role model for them. Bronze is a good start. It’s like wading in rather than jumping in the deep end of the pool.” She continued, “We also have a culture at Cascadia of ‘pay it forward’ where someone who has achieved something of importance like a Gold Award reaches out to those just beginning with an application for the Bronze or Silver award.”
Start with the Basics: Data, Processes, and Improvement
Despite their success with earning these awards, Maryruth says, “You don’t have to start with the award program. There are lot of educational tools that explain how to use data, how to evaluate processes. People over-think things when they just need to get started on improvement somewhere in their operations.”
If a Leader Quits Performance Excellence, They Aren’t in It for the Right Reasons
We asked what she’d tell leaders who apply for an award and don’t achieve it on their initial attempt. She said, “If they want to throw up their hands and quit, potentially they aren’t in this process for the right reason. The benefits of the feedback reports are enormous in assisting leaders on that real quality journey. They need to ask themselves, ‘What was your initial “why,” and is it the right “why?”” She encourages them to look at their data from when they started on the journey, and they’ll see that they’re getting better, and their organization is improving. “That’s the right ‘why.’”
Get Started With a Tiered Award Program
Are you finding reasons (ahem, excuses) not to get your organization started on its own performance excellence journey? Many other Alliance programs
https://baldrigealliance.org/ also have tiered levels of awards that make it easy to dip your toe in the Baldrige water, so to speak. And the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program has multiple tools for facilitating a self-assessment, including a new product,
Foundations for a Successful Business, https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/self-assessing/improvement-tools/foundations-successful-business that breaks the Baldrige Criteria into just a few questions written in plain English for easy accessibility to each category.
Summer’s winding down. Time to test the water!