For the past few years, everytime I took over a new facility, one of the first things I did was to distribute my BASICS MEMO to each and every employee and go through it with them in my first inservice.  Then, every new hire orientation had time set aside for me to personally sit down with new team members and go over the basics with them, too. The BASICS MEMO was compiled after having to troubleshoot many facilities and seeing the same...

Today, we’ll talk about hypersexuality of the nursing home resident when there is no 2 –party consent for sexual advances, and what to do to manage this behavior. In the nursing home industry, you’ll run across it sooner or later.  A little male resident who goes from female resident to female resident attempting to touch, kiss, and grope them inappropriately.  He disrobes in public… or worse.  He tries to go into their...

Today, we have a guest post from our friend Daniel over at Cherry Hill Adult Family Home.  The point of view is from an assisted living perspective, but we can find many similarities in the NH industry.  You can see Daniel’s Assisted Living Blog HERE. You’ve done your background checks, screenings, and interview and have selected a new caregiver to start training in your assisted living facility. Although you’ve done everything...

Every facility at one point or another will have to come to terms with the expression of sexuality by their residents.  This creates a ton of confusion with the staff, administration, corporate, families, ombudsman, and surveyors. To tell you the truth, it can be very confusing if you’ve never had to deal with it before or had no one to teach you.  That was the case for me, as well.  So, after having dealt with a few of these...

So you want to become a great nursing home administrator.  But you find yourself not quite attaining the level of success you aspire to.  Have you asked yourself one simple question:  What am I doing wrong? You want to accomplish great things in this long term care industry we call home.  Here are 10 points to consider.  If you’re doing any of  these, it could very well be the roadblock on your highway to success. 1.  Not...

I recently encountered an issue with the way employees are being paid in one facility.  It seems that at one point, the Nurse Administration team members other than the DON - ADON, RN supervisors, MDS, support staff, etc. were all paid hourly.  That’s fine.  They simply need to manage their hours to avoid unnecessary and unapproved overtime.  However, one of the Nurse Admin team members ended up having to work the floor in a...

I attended a seminar the other day on healthcare marketing.  One of the focuses was to break down your types of calls and define what the key elements are.  So, today, we’re breaking down a nursing home marketing cold call and how we get past the gatekeeper. One of the first things to realize is that the relationship with the gatekeeper can be just as important as the one with the actual referral decision-maker.  If you screw up...

One of the easiest ways to get tags cited in your facility is to invite the State to pay you a visit.  Self-reports of unusual incidents can and will get you deficiencies.  Let’s say you discover something in your facility that went wrong and had a negative outcome.  Most of the time, it is almost like a race to make sure the facility gets the report in to the State timely.  You get the initial report in and...

Usually nursing homes and home health agencies can be found at opoosite ends of the spectrum when it comes to referrals.  Nursing homes want the referral to come into the facility for rehab while home health wants the referrals to go home with their services.  I recently found a way to partner with home health care agencies that I hadn’t thought of previously. Many times home health patients may be too expensive for the home health...