Family & Nursing Care CEO on How the Company Recruits ‘the Best of the Best’

It’s easy for a company to burn out and eventually lose steam.

But for Family & Nursing Care, that hasn’t happened just yet. The company has been around since the late 1960s, and for the last 15 years, it has seen consistent annual growth.

Based in Maryland, Family & Nursing Care is one of the largest private-pay home care companies in the Washington, D.C., area. Currently, the company provides just under 41,000 hours of care per week.

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Over the past 15 years, it has seen between 8% to 10% growth annually. Family & Nursing Care CEO Neal Kursban credits the company’s methodical approach.

“We’re sort of a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of a company,” he told Home Health Care News. “This is what works for us.”

Indeed, “slow and steady” has become somewhat of a signature strategy for the company, which opened its second office in 2018. These days, Family & Nursing Care has four offices and is looking to expand geographically.

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“Assuming this expansion works, the way I envision it is staying in Maryland and then going to some bordering states and growing geographically in those markets,” Kursban said. “I don’t know if, on my watch, I’ll ever expand west of the Mississippi.”

Kursban knows it’s rare to see as much growth as Family & Nursing Care has already experienced while remaining in one geographic market. However, the main goal of these expansion efforts is to increase access to care.

“I am finally like, you know what, let’s branch out,” he said. “I just feel like we can do more for more people.”

Staffing also remains top of mind for the company that has, in the past, been able to achieve a yearly turnover rate of about 14%. For comparison, the industry-wide caregiver turnover rate checked in at 65.2% in 2020, according to data from Home Care Pulse.

Still, like many of Family & Nursing Care’s home care peers, the company found itself working to rebuild its staff after its total caregiver count dropped by almost 20% from February to April in 2020 — an impact of the public health emergency.

Since then, Family & Nursing Care has slowly beefed up its caregiver staff again. Overall, staffing challenges haven’t prevented Family & Nursing Care from being judicious about who’s recruited to join the company.

“We’re very selective about the caregivers we choose to bring on,” Kursban said. “This calendar year, we brought on 7% of the caregivers who were interested. We’re able to select, I’d say, the best of the best.”

Kursban ascribes the influx of applications to Family & Nursing Care’s reputation of having a good company culture. Along these lines, hourly pay at the company rates above the industry average — at between $14 to $20 per hour.

In 2019, direct care workers earned a median hourly wage of $12.80, a meager improvement from $12.61 in 2009, according to data from PHI.

“I am of the opinion that it’s hard for people to live on $13 an hour,” Kursban said. “They should make more money than that.”

On the retention side, Family & Nursing Care goes straight to the source.

“We survey our caregivers, and they tell us where we’re excelling and where we’re not,” Kursban said. “The areas where we’re not excelling, we see how we can improve. We take their feedback very seriously, and we have a very high response rate. We have 1,400 caregivers, and somewhere between 60% and 70% respond to our surveys.”

Additionally, the company has a number of employee benefits such as health insurance, a 401(k) with discretionary match and dental insurance. In fact, Family & Nursing Care began offering dental insurance after receiving employee feedback from one of its surveys.

As the year winds down, Kursban is focused on encouraging Family & Nursing Care staff to get vaccinated.

“I do think it’s important to have your workers vaccinated, and that’s not a political statement,” he said. “The people that tend to not make it through COVID are older, which is the company’s population. I feel a responsibility to do my part to protect them to the best of my ability.”

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