Senior Living Safety and Satisfaction
The role of a caregiver is known to be a stressful one with nurses, aides and caregivers prone to burnout and fatigue. The combined daily emotional, physical and mental efforts required of nurses, CNAs and other care staff daily can lead to compassion fatigue, which can result in indifferent care, low morale, missed work and safety hazards. With a variety of different hazards present, your community needs to take additional steps to hire the best and most qualified candidates to ensure safety at your community.
Hiring for performance and safety
To counter these unique challenges, many senior living communities offer wellness programs to their employees, where the focus is on keeping their bodies healthy and their minds energized. These programs provide tools and support that caregivers need to deal with the stress in their challenging career. They also represent a substantial investment by the communities themselves, who see the payoff in reduced injuries and increased employee optimism. But is there more that can be done?
Safety and wellness programs are solid investments for these communities, but they aren’t necessarily preventive measures. The use of behavioral background checks can be used to ensure an employee is the best fit for the positon prior to entering a role. Human resource professionals in this field should include online pre-employment checking tools that are validated specifically for caregiving organizations that focus on specific job descriptions, such as CNAs, nurses, resident caregivers and administrative staff.
Insight Worldwide’s Premium Care Selection (PCS) is one of the industry’s most recognized best practices that can help pinpoint details about an applicant’s key characteristics:
- Behavior: Compassion, dedication and communication skills are only a few of the many characteristics Insight Worldwide measures. The assessment results are provided immediately and identify those applicants who have the most potential for success.
- Retention: Indicators spotlight those individuals who are less prone to turnover, and the results provide follow-up tools to engage with applicants during the interview process.
- Job duties: Results indicate candidates with a willingness to perform the minimum duties of the job, which is basic measure that is critical to know before making a hiring offer.
- Unsafe actions: Direct admission to counterproductive behaviors, such as theft, drug use, and workers’ compensation fraud allow organizations to avoid people who pose a direct safety risk to residents and coworkers.
Impacts on senior living
Once an organization identifies its strongest candidates, the online software will support the hiring manager by providing scientifically designed interview questions that align with candidate results.
By following Insight Worldwide's PCS results and resources, organizations have:
- Reduced turnover: In some cases, turnover rates have decreased about 41 percent for CNAs and nurses, leading to financial savings for your community.
- Increased community performance: CNAs hired using Insight Worldwide’s checking tool, on average, score 10 percent higher in overall job performance; and monetarily outperform their counterparts selected without the tool by $1,661 per year, based on supervisor reviews for employee attendance, job performance, interpersonal conflict, anger management, risk behavior and performance.
- Lower workers’ compensation costs: Workers’ compensation incidence frequency can be lowered and help reduce the average cost of a claim.
(*All statistics provided by Insight Worldwide.)
Differentiate your communities
Consider adding behavior checking to set your senior living organization apart from the rest with quality of care, service, safety, and security starting at the time of hire. Please contact Church Mutual’s Risk Control Central team discuss how this tool and others can support your organization.
To make a difference in your communities today with, contact Insight Worldwide: Call: 888-314-8908 or email: info@insightww.com
