Scheduling Tips for Home Health Care Agencies

 

Strategies for Successful Scheduling in Home Health Care Agencies

Effective Scheduling is a make-or-break workflow function in your home care agency. This blog will give you the top tips and best practices to make your scheduling strategy efficient and effective.

Tip #1.  Use home health software to match clients to caregivers

Most home health software systems include features that providers can use to schedule clients based on a variety of attributes. It’s important to match clients by:

●       Condition specific-training

●       Frequency/Amount of visits already completed with that client

●       Distance to the client

●       Personality

●       Pet preferences

●       Transportation

●       Smoking

Treat your clients according to their individual needs. There are those clients that will need a caregiver that can take them to appointments. Others, in turn, may just need caregivers who can prepare meals and conduct minor household tasks. Understanding your clients and matching them to staff is an important part of a successful agency. The average acuity of care is higher than it has been in the past. This means that it is increasingly important to staff clients with appropriately trained and experienced caregivers. Train caregivers so that they are prepared for the work they will encounter face-to-face with clients.

 It may sound frustrating and like extra work to match caregivers to client personality, but personality dynamics clashes can spiral out of control quickly, irrespective of the skills and ability of a caregiver, leading to higher costs and more wasted time to correct the problem.

Tip #2.  Think proactively about overtime hours

You may find yourself in an 11th-hour bind, grabbing your cell phone to call your best caregivers who work 40+ hours a week. Consider those that may only have a few hours once in a while or those that may be PRN (as needed)? Caregiver burnout is a real thing, so work hard to keep it away from your staff. Burnout rears it's ugly head more often than not in settings like senior care, in-home and home health care based on research from JAMA (31.5% of registered nurses reported that they left their job due to burnout). Stay on top of unintended long-term consequences of excessive overtime and its effects on the books and the nurses when scheduling clients.

Tip #3. Respect your staff's time 

As agency admins and managers learn how caregivers work and what shifts they prefer, pay the proper respect to those boundaries. Ask clinicians to inform managers of their communication preferences (text messages, phone calls, emails, etc). Avoid blurring the lines between work and private time by contacting staff when they are not on the clock. Nurses and clinicians usually provide their range of availability upon hiring, and it is important to offer them opportunities that work within the schedule and the parameters of the work week they agreed upon and expect. Not everyone is willing or available to change their schedule specifically for the agency's unpredictable needs, but do keep your open shifts in mind when hiring caregivers.

Tip #4. Get to know the staff and patients you serve

It takes a little time and attention, but it is important for your scheduler or care coordinator’s onboarding session to allow time for them to go through patient files or your CRM to get a preliminary idea of who they will be scheduling. Training new schedulers is a learning curve, especially when your caregivers and clients get acquainted with those that create and maintain their schedules. When onboarding caregivers into your home health agency, make sure to facilitate an easy transition with everyone ranging from the recruiter to their scheduler. This first impression will help to introduce caregivers to who they will be dealing with most of the time, and help the schedulers establish who will work well with who. The opportunity to meet in person during hiring or orientation can be a great time to knock this out. Build good relationships from the onset! Consequentially, schedulers will be more informed of the changing needs of clients, building trust and rapport with clinicians. The trickle-down effect here also impacts how willing caregivers will be to pick up extra shifts at the last minute.

And that's how you schedule for success...

Foster a meaningful and succinct relationship with clients and caregivers, through implementing best practices and solid protocols that are easily accessible to both admins and clinician staff. As a result, your schedulers will be set up for success, and you'll strengthen your chances of home health care agency staff retention. Caregivers will be more satisfied with their jobs and will feel encouraged to do better every day that they work for your clients while clients/patients will be more forthcoming about their needs and wants. Matching clients and caregivers based on personality will add a needed extra component to the effort that goes into scheduling. Mastering the craft of scheduling/care coordination is a balanced combination of art and science. There’s no universal way to schedule, but patient happiness and staff satisfaction can coexist and bring greater balance and sustainability to home healthcare agencies as a whole.

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