Staffing shortages are the No. 1 industry headwind that home-based care providers are facing.
At the same time, ubiquity of this issue has created an environment where the most innovative providers have been able to rise to occasion, cultivating staffing strategies that have allowed them to lessen the impact of the persistent pain point.
“There’s no silver bullet to staffing,” Jeff Knapp, chief people officer at Bayada Home Health Care, said Wednesday during a panel discussion at Home Health Care News Staffing Summit. “It continues to be incredibly competitive in all of the kinds of roles that we’re trying to fill, from caregivers to office staff. Candidates are being much more selective. The whole equation has changed. COVID, in addition to a number of other societal factors, have really changed things.”
The Moorestown, New Jersey-based Bayada is one of the largest home health providers in the country. It has over 360 locations across 23 states and six other countries.
Similarly, Amedisys (Nasdaq: AMED) doesn’t believe that conditions creating staffing challenges will let up anytime soon.
“We are going to live with what we’re in right now for a very long time to come,” Adam Holton, chief people officer at Amedisys, said during the event. “I don’t see any sort of daylight in between what we’re hearing out there and what we’re feeling.”
The Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Amedisys provides home health, hospice and higher-acuity care services in over three dozen states. The company recently announced a plan to merge with Option Care Health (Nasdaq: OPCH) in a $3.6 billion deal.
Staffing insights
There has been an increase in applications for nursing roles at Amedisys. Applications are up 50% this year compared to 2022.
Additionally, Amedisys’ accepted offers rate have gone up to 20%. Turnover is down 10% in most of the company’s key roles.
Bayada has experienced similar staffing victories.
When it comes to staffing, Knapp believes that the attention tends to go to recruitment even though retention is the bigger issue. As a result, Bayada has tried to zero-in on enhancing both the candidate and employee experiences.
“When we look at the leakage in our pipeline, the talent pipeline, meaning from the moment we contact a person, before they’re ever hired to whenever they leave, the leaky points are driven by experience,” Knapp said.
Bayada has also found that creating a long-term career path for its employees has had a positive impact on its retention efforts.
“Keeping those people and engaging them, and helping them stay beyond their first or second year is the biggest challenge that we have,” Knapp said. “That really relates to a career path, and it relates to developmental opportunities, and moving away from what I call ‘episodic training and development,’ to more of an immersive learning experience. What we’re finding is people leave us because they don’t see the pathway forward.”
At Amedisys, there are three outcomes that the company is trying to drive in its staffing strategy, according to Holton.
“We want to attract the best people in health care, we want to support an unrivaled ‘people experience,’ and then we want to create capacity,” he said. “No matter how good you do on the first piece, which is bringing people in, on the second piece, which is engaging and retaining them, you always have opportunities. Whether you’re talking about optimizing your workforce, automation, role design, there’s lots of different ways to make sure that you’re optimizing the capacity that you actually do have.”
The company has leaned into creating the best first-year experience for Amedisys caregivers.
“That first year experience touches everything,” Holton said. “It touches technology; it touches people; it touches processes; it touches so many different things, so we’re spending a lot of time as it relates to that.”
Amedisys is also employing a new applicant tracking system, according to Holton.
“In this increasingly digital world it gets to more candidates, and in many cases with less spend,” he said.
Ultimately, Knapp believes that while there are many variables with staffing, there’s also a huge opportunity.
“This is going to be a long-standing problem,” he said. “We’re going to do little things that are going to add up. We’ll do 100 of these little things that will make a difference, as we move on.”
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