Educating Your Staff and Yourself
Whether you have a staff of one or a thousand, your agency’s success depends upon you AND your staff knowing what they are doing. All too frequent changes in Medicare, coding, billing and all the other nuances of home care mean that you must constantly keep yourself and your staff educated. If you are new in the Home Care or Hospice arena yourself, how do you accomplish that?
Let’s see, you could hire only seasoned professionals who already are up to speed and can do their visits and chart perfectly on time, every time. Good luck with that. You could provide weekly inservices and every one will come just for the donuts. Sure they will. You could threaten them with demanding they attend or you will take their firstborn child and they would throw in the second one free.
So how can you be sure education is a priority? First it must be YOUR priority. If you don’t care enough to make information available, you can’t expect your staff to rush out and find it. Worse yet, your seasoned clinicians will lose motivation and your less trained staff will not even comprehend what they do wrong. If you take the lead in education and share with enthusiasm, you invite discussion and can show the value to your agency.
How can you make staff education a priority? Make it worthwhile. Pay for their time. Make it as painless as possible if not outright enjoyable. Here are some ideas I have seen used.
Involve your staff in the training. Find clinicians or office staff who enjoy teaching and let them research and present new ideas.
Make games of it. Play “What is wrong with this picture?” Take real mistakes and include them into a practice 485 and see who can find the most errors. Make some errors ridiculous to keep them smiling.
Reward staff with CE classes, then have them share what they learned
Share the information. If you subscribe to newsletters and journals, place them where staff can browse on their downtime. Post important articles.
Watch for potential “gurus” and encourage them. Maybe the quiet clinician who has mastered the clinical charting software is a better one on one mentor for a struggling learner than the dynamic class instructor who gets frustrated with slow learners.
Teach the right people the right stuff. Although it would be nice if all clinicians could code, the likelihood is small. For many clinicians it is mind numbingly boring. Find the right clinical person, pair them with the right office person, send them to an annual Coding for Home Care class*, and you will find it a worthwhile investment.
Involve your staff in the news. If you have weekly meetings, spend a moment or two telling them what is going on in the world of Home Care. Make the world real by talking about the issues and problems across the country. It is easier to discuss fraud and abuse by discussing what happened to someone else than to have OIG knocking on your door. Encourage questions. Talk about your own practices. Discuss how they stand up to the test of integrity. Discuss how your agency meets CoPs and what surveyors look for when they come.
Find good teaching resources. Budget for staff education. There are excellent resources out there these days. A few examples are listed below.
Make education an ongoing function of your agency. Set the expectation from the hiring process that all staff members are responsible for knowing more than just their own job functions. Home Care is a dynamic, ever evolving industry and that requires keeping up.
Resources:
Home Care Institute www.homecareinstitute.com. Online learning by subscription at a reasonable price. Eligible for Continuing Education. Teaching modules are excellently done. Has some free demo classes on the site.
Decision Health http://www.decisionhealth.com/HomeHealth/homeHealth.aspx
Industry leader in newsletters and seminars.
Home Health Aide Digest http://www.hhadigest.com/
NAHC http://www.nahc.org/education/home.htm
