The LeadingAge Workforce Cabinet has spent a year defining the skills sets for personal care attendants, care coordinators, and middle managers to deliver effective supports and services. Now, the Cabinet wants to make sure that nursing homes, home health agencies and housing properties will use those competencies to strengthen their workforces.
The LeadingAge Workforce Cabinet has spent a year defining the skills sets for personal care attendants, care coordinators and middle managers to deliver effective supports and services.
Now, the Cabinet wants to make sure that nursing homes, home health agencies and housing properties will use those competencies to strengthen their workforces.
The Workforce Cabinet -- a group of educators, state association executives and LeadingAge provider members -- discussed in March strategies and resources that could help LeadingAge provider members create healthy workplaces and improve the workforce.
During their March meeting, members of the Workforce Cabinet worried that the current economic downturn could make LeadingAge members too complacent about the need to address persistent workforce challenges facing the aging field. The current economic climate has helped to stabilize turnover rates.
But those rates are likely to rise sharply again as soon as the economy recovers.
An Organizational Readiness Assessment could help a LeadingAge member objectively examine its workplace, identify that workplace’s strengths, and assess how it might be improved. Staff members at all levels could use the tool to record their perceptions of the benefits and challenges of working for the organization.
Those responses could then be used to assign a score to the organization’s work environment and culture.
The Cabinet discussed a package of supplementary materials that could be targeted to an organization’s specific score on an Organizational Readiness Assessment. Those resources could help the organization address and resolve any workplace issues that surfaced during the assessment.
“It’s difficult to attract and retain qualified workers unless your organization supports those workers after they arrive,” says Natasha Bryant, managing director and senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research. “A readiness assessment is really the first step in this process. An organization that carries out this type of assessment will be in a much better position to make full use of the competencies that the Workforce Cabinet will release next fall.”
The Workforce Cabinet plans to help nursing homes, home health agencies and housing providers incorporate its workforce competencies into their hiring and training practices. The Cabinet believes that these providers might benefit from:
“The Cabinet’s primary goal is to make the competencies easy to use so that providers will use them,” says Bryant. “We would like to offer providers an all-in-one package that takes them from the readiness assessment right through to actually using the competencies to hire, orient, evaluate and train personal care attendants, care coordinators and middle managers.”
The Workforce Cabinet held its first meeting in April 2012 and will serve until April 2014.
The cabinet is co-chaired by Barry Berman, chief executive officer (CEO) of Chelsea Jewish Home Foundation in Chelsea, MA, and Frances Roebuck Kuhns, president and CEO of WRC Senior Services in Brookville, PA.