Financial Incentives, Daily Pay Identified as Key to Fighting Staffing Shortages

While the in-home care industry faces a number of challenges, staffing still looms largest for providers. The workforce shortage can hinder everything from business growth and compliance to patient outcomes and bottom lines — but financial incentives like daily pay could help fix the problem.

That’s according to the results of a recent staffing survey from Home Health Care News and Axxess, who recently collaborated to examine which areas of the in-home health care business are impacted most by workforce challenges.

The online survey polled more than 400 industry professionals and HHCN readers about how staffing shortages are affecting their business and how they’re attempting to fix the problem.

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Of the most stark findings: 96% of respondents said staffing challenges have impacted their businesses’ ability to grow to some degree, while 88% said it somehow affected their ability to improve patient outcomes. On top of that, 76% said workforce shortages impacted their ability to maintain compliance.

While organizations are considering a number of solutions to address industry-wide staffing challenges, respondents identified financial incentives such as daily pay were as the best strategy, with 30% of those surveyed naming it as the single best way to combat the issue.

Companies like BrightSpring Health Services have already begun offering daily pay to their caregivers with much success.

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“We fully believe that the companies that are able to attract and retain caregivers are the companies that are going to see the growth in the coming months and years in the space,” Rexanne Domico, president of home health care services and neuro rehabilitation at BrightSpring, previously told HHCN. “The ability to solve [for pay challenges] for this workforce is … a huge answer to this problem.”

Louisville, Kentucky-based BrightSpring is one of the largest providers of home and community-based health services in the U.S.

Additionally, flexible scheduling (18%) and more comprehensive onboarding (17%) were also identified as top strategies in addressing workforce shortages, with, rewards programs (9%) and technology (8%) trailing behind.

“Our company is doing what we can to help providers meet staffing challenges with effective technology solutions, and we are very pleased that these survey results provide meaningful insights on effective strategies for the industry to consider moving forward,” John Olajide, founder and CEO of Axxess said in the statement.

Companies featured in this article:

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