However well you choose a home health care provider, no company or caregiver is perfect. Home health care is very personal and little changes or issues will inevitably arise. Some of the tips we offer in Five Tips for Choosing a Quality Home Health Provider and Home Care Assistance Success Factors will help you determine how the company will treat your concerns and what they do to continually improve to provide better care for you. However, there is a big difference in your client experience when a company just reacts well to stated concerns versus proactively identifying areas of improvement for you.
While we encourage clients to call us any time with concerns or needs, we don’t think the burden should fall solely on the client and family. We know from experience that clients don’t always bring up areas where we could improve. Sometimes there are little things you could suggest, but don’t want to sound like you’re complaining. You may think an issue is too petty or you aren’t sure what to expect. You may simply not feel comfortable making that call, or maybe you have concerns about losing the help you rely on or just feel too overwhelmed with other things at the moment.
To better address this area, EasyLiving added a Client Care Supervisor position to enhance our quality assurance process. The Client Care Supervisor provides direct supervision in the home setting to our caregiver team, setting them up to be more successful in the care they provide to each client. The purpose is to make regular supervisory visits to all clients in the home to have face-to-face insight in to the care being provided, troubleshoot any concerns and coach our caregivers on possible improvements.
It gives us the opportunity to evaluate caregivers more directly, give them tailored feedback and ensure the highest quality home care. This is one tool to proactively find ways to better meet our clients’ needs. We can also spot all the great things our caregivers do in order to properly thank and reward them.
Our clients and caregivers have been reacting positively to this new role and our home visits have reinforced why this is such an important step. On a recent visit, the client shared how much it has meant to her that the caregiver took time to get to know how she liked things done. She shared the ways the caregiver had made her comfortable when they first met and how efficient she had been in completing all her tasks. Now, we can reinforce this positive behavior, thank the caregiver and share tips from this situation with our team. The client also shared that she had not been as pleased with her prior caregiver with another agency, but she had never contacted them to report her concerns. After a recent hospitalization, she had simply switched agencies after hearing about EasyLiving from a friend. It reinforced to us why it is so vital that we have proactive outreach to clients. We want to do what we can to spot issues before they even become a concern, to fulfill unspoken requests and fix what may seem like minor problems.
Meet our Client Care Supervisor, Bernadette Colstock:
Bernadette Colstock has over 20 years of experience as a home caregiver and is also an instructor at Florida Medical Prep, where she helps to train home health aides. Many of our EasyLiving caregivers had Bernadette as an instructor, and she enjoys being able to further mentor them in their field work. Bernadette has already made home visits to several EasyLiving clients and looks forward to her ongoing role in our mission to create an environment where we set our team members up for success empowering them to provide the best in home care to our community.
Looking for high quality home health care services in Pinellas County, Florida? Give us a call at 727-448-0900 or click below:
EasyLiving is a Home Care Pulse “Best in Home Care” Agency, awarded to home health agencies receiving top industry quality assurance scores. If you are searching for a quality agency in other areas of the country, you can visit the Best of Home Care website.
