Posts Categorized: Uncategorized

Building Your Home Care Employer Brand: Your People

In our previous blogpost, Addressing the Caregiver Crisis, we talked about the need to stand out as a great place to work. According to The Muse, an innovative talent development agency, employees are assessing your company based on the 3 Ps: People: What is the flavor of your team? Is it friendly and supportive? Path: Is there…

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Addressing the Caregiver Crisis: People, Path, Purpose

According to the 2017 Home Care Pulse Benchmarking Study, caregiver turnover is at an all-time high (67%). Indeed, staff shortages are the biggest challenge identified by home care leaders. Home care is not alone It’s an employees’ market. According to Symphony Talent, a general recruitment “talent acquisition” firm, voluntary resignations are high across all sectors….

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Marketing Palliative Care to Physicians

More than 50% of doctors do not know the difference between palliative care and hospice (!!!). This was the finding of a focus group conducted by Transcend Hospice Marketing. While scary, it does point to a strategic entry for increasing your palliative care referrals. Confusion is understandable Many of the solutions provided by hospice and…

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Marketing Palliative Care: Do you need a separate brand?

One doesn’t drop one’s cherished branding on a whim. There are clearly pluses and minuses to setting up a separate brand for your palliative care program. But research reveals some pretty compelling pluses! What’s in a name? Let’s start with these data from a study done at MC Anderson and published in The Oncologist. As…

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Palliative Care Marketing: More than “NOT Hospice”

When explaining palliative care, it’s tempting to compare and contrast it to hospice. But research from the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) indicates that defining palliative care in the context of how it differs from hospice only muddies the waters. Palliative care programs need to stand on their own and define themselves independently. How…

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Sweet memories of my mother

This was taken two weeks ago, which was two days before she died. She kept wanting to entertain the nurses with her stories but was having trouble tracking her thoughts, so everyone in the room closed our eyes and “took a nap together” so she could rest.  We were able to move her back home…

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Who are your best website viewers?

Elder care is not like e-commerce. We can’t look at shopping cart totals and know what worked best. For elder care providers, the best website viewers are those who ultimately pick up the phone. They want to learn more, and hopefully this will lead to an admission or contract. I’ll take three visitors who pick…

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Men as Family Caregivers

It used to be a classic stereotype: The brother “disappears” as Mom and Dad start needing more help. The eldest sister steps in and has to shoulder the entire burden, never mind her other obligations… Thankfully, that’s changing, and quickly! Eight years ago, 34% of family caregivers were male. Now that’s up to 40%, amounting…

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Shared Decision Making and Patient Engagement

Everyone strives to be “patient centered,” but truthfully, there’s been a bit of marketing spin on that, with not a lot of shift in institutional focus. CMS’s new regulations for home health really make the patient’s goals the meaningful centerpiece of the care plan. I have just returned from the New England Home Care and…

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Family caregivers reduce readmission rates

A study recently released in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society conducted a review (meta-analysis) that looked at the results of discharge interventions that specifically included family caregivers. The studies included in this review were published between 1990 and April 2016. Only randomized clinical trials were included (meaning they all had a treatment group and…

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