I Love My Nurse: Four Important Factors For Hiring Home Health Care Staff

Health & Medical Blog

Home health care companies have to really invest in the people that they hire to get the best results for customers and stay competitive. Here are four things that are very important for home healthcare companies and the people who hire them.

Bedside Manner

Just like doctors and nurses in a care facility, home health care professionals need to be friendly and personable. It's absolutely important that when the customer sees that person walking in his or her front door, he or she thinks, "I'm happy to see my nurse today." Too many companies employ people who may have technical skills but have no bedside manner and may even be rude or mean to customers. That's not a sustainable way to do business, and it really hurts everyone who's involved in the process.

Credentialing

Home health care personnel also need specific credentials in order to do their jobs correctly and up to industry standards. Even lower level workers such as assistants may need credentials in CPR and first aid, administration of medications, and other vital training, and these need to be up to date. Companies with a good grasp of credentialing enforcement last longer than others.

Trustworthiness

Home healthcare professionals are people who are coming into the customer's home. As such, the customer needs to be able to trust them not to steal from the home or endanger them in their home environments. In addition to being friendly, home health care people need to be trustworthy and professional in their dealings with patients. It's not an easy thing to have strangers come into a home, and companies need to make sure people are well-screened to be able to reassure patients that they are in good hands.

Care with Physical Procedures

While a lot of what home health care workers do involves consultation and observation of patients, some of it is, to some extent, invasive. Perhaps the best example is phlebotomy. Home health care staff need to be trained to use absolute care in blood draws, not only to reinforce the idea of bedside manner and trust, but also to make the process is as comfortable as possible for the patient. Hiring someone who's extremely skilled at phlebotomy is going to be vastly more valuable to the company than hiring someone who can technically do a blood draw, but might have a hard time finding a vein and actually getting the needle in effectively.

Think about all these things for hiring home health care staffers such as those at Champion Home Health Care.

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17 June 2015

Outstanding In-Home Care

When my mother fell at home and broke her hip, we all thought that we were going to have no choice to put her in a nursing home when she got out of the hospital. My mother had always asked us kids to avoid putting her in any kind of home, but we didn’t know what else we could do. None of us were capable of giving her the kind of rehabilitation and care that she needed. Then her doctor suggested that we find out if her insurance covered in-home care. I didn’t even know that that was an option. I was pleased to discover that in-home care was covered by her plan. Now she gets great care from nurses and nurse assistants that come right to her in her home, where she wants to be. It’s a great option, and I’m so glad we have it.