Home-Based Care Providers See Staffing Tailwinds from Inflation, Travel Nursing Decrease

Home Health Care News

The staffing situation has been dire in home-based care for a long time, but there could finally be tailwinds slowly gaining momentum at providers’ backs.

There is an increasing amount of evidence suggesting that the home health and home care labor markets could get a boost from two somewhat unexpected types of workers: sidelined ones returning to their respective fields and travel or contract nurses finally looking to find a home.

That evidence is both data-driven and anecdotal.

For instance, after a long and hard stretch during the pandemic, the Atlanta-based Visiting Nurse Health System (VNHS) has seen its best 90-day recruiting stretch in over three years.

“I have 20 nurses in orientation right now,” VNHS CEO Dorothy Davis told Home Health Care News. “We’re a small- to mid-sized home health and hospice business, so that’s a lot of capacity we have in motion in our business right now. I’ve never had 20 nurses in orientation before.”

Specifically, there is a zip code that VNHS serves where the company has been leaving $15,000 in business on the table on a weekly basis due to capacity constraints. It could never gain ground in that area from a hiring standpoint.

Until now. In just one week recently, it was able to hire three workers in that area.

There are likely a large amount of factors contributing to this encouraging stretch for VNHS. The company has a strong enough culture that word of mouth between in-house clinicians and others is still a strong recruiting source. It has also raised pay and incentives.

But it has to be more than that, Davis said.

“I don’t know if it’s 100% attributable to inflation, but I think that’s probably a component of it. I regularly hear from our staff about the inflation pressure,” she said. “We did make a pay adjustment in February that’s probably attributable to some of our success, too, but there’s just a lot more activity going on from [a labor standpoint] right now. I am also hearing from contractors who are tired of doing travel and contract work, just wanting a place to belong.”

Many home health providers have been hurt by inflation pressures. But at the same time, those pressures are also hurting the workers. Those that are employed are picking up more shifts to compensate, and others that have been sidelined due to a variety of COVID-related factors are returning to their fields.

Reactivation of formerly employed caregivers grew as a recruiting source in 2021, according to Home Care Pulse’s annual Benchmarking Study. It was one of the only recruitment sources that saw growth, and also likely ticked up more in the beginning of 2022.

“There’s people coming back to the industry that maybe were hesitant due to either regulatory issues, [personal] issues or COVID-19 that had removed themselves from the workforce,” Home Care Pulse President Todd Austin recently told Home Health Care News. “And so as we continue to see normalization from the pandemic, I believe we’ll see more employees. There are also agencies actively recruiting previous employees to come back.”

Read Full Article