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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Health Care
They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges
The quotes below are about this issue:
Long-Term Care: Long-term care facilities, in particular, have difficulty attracting and retaining health care professionals. Because long-term facilities are not reimbursed at the same rates as hospitals, they cannot always provide competitive compensation. Additionally, the image of long-term care is generally seen as less "glamorous" than other health care environments. Employers need more health care professionals who are dedicated to a career in geriatric care and/or in nursing home facilities. Students also need a greater understanding of the nursing home model, which includes the social model of aging in addition to the medical model of aging.
| "I'm wondering whether some sort of coursework, or concentration, for those that are interested in working with the elderly—if there was an emphasis for people to be able to move in that direction? To understand these complex seniors that are, on average, 85-years-old? If people are interested in working in that field, then there has to be more specialized training." | Central |
| "It's nice with our nursing assistants. They come and do the clinicals in our nursing home, and so they get that feel for it already. I don't know if the RNs or LPNs do clinicals in a nursing home. They often use the nursing home as their stepping stone. They can get a job there, it's their first job, and as soon as they have that experience, they move on to the hospitals or the clinics where the pay is better and the hours are better. So, we get a lot of the new graduates. We are kind of a training field; we're their clinical training field to move on to something else. So, it would be nice if they did some of their clinical studies in a nursing home instead of walking into us kind of unprepared. We have our best success with the ones that we grow ourselves, our nursing assistants, and our LPNs. And we've paid for all of their tuition, and their books, and their fees to go on to their next step. And they have that background already in the long-term care." | Central |
| "Employer 1: Coming from the memory care side, it's really hard to find nurses that have experience with dementia and Alzheimer's patients. I need somebody who is going to know medications and who knows what's going on. Because that person may not be able to communicate in order to say, 'I have pain,' or 'I have these needs.' It's hard to find nurses that have that experience. And you can't throw somebody in that's never had experience with dementia and say, 'Here you go. This person is hitting out—or whatever it may be—how are you going to deal with that?' I think it's scary for some nurses. Employer 2: It's a lack of exposure to that type of behavior." |
Central |
| "Anybody that's worked in the area knows how many are coming up, and how soon people are diagnosed with dementia, and how fast it can progress for some of them. Most nurses just don't have that experience." | Central |
| "I think when you talked about doing clinicals in nursing homes, one of the nursing homes—we are a clinical site—but we were one of the last ones to be chosen. They want to go to obstetrics or they want to go to pediatrics. So, I think that's part of the issue, we are not the glamorous part of the medical field or the nursing field. The attitude seems to be, 'Well, I could just get a job at a nursing home, or I can get a job in home care.' So, they do that for a while until they can get something else. I think there should be some more emphasis in the training that they need to have, not that they choose to have. Because sooner or later they are going to end up working with some type of elderly or chronic population. And I think that, like I said, we are not the first choice to do the clinicals. We get a few, but not many, and usually it's somebody who's worked prior as a student." | Central |
| "Think of that employee that's in the hospital, for instance. And you have your elderly patients going to the hospital. I stood outside of the emergency room, right outside of a hospital here, and a resident was screaming because she was afraid. I had the EMT in front of me say, 'You should have heard her on the way over, but she's finally quiet. She has dementia—she doesn't understand what's going on.' She was put on a gurney, and she didn't recognize the faces, and she was whipping by the lights, and she was afraid. But some people don't understand that part of it—to just understand the concept that she was afraid, and that's how she was communicating it. It's just frustrating to me to stand there and to hear them say that." | Central |
| "I discovered yesterday, and I knew it was bad, that the wage difference between acute care and long-term care for an RN is now $30,000 a year. That's impacting who we are getting for applicants. We are also a clinical site for [MnSCU college] Licensed Practical Nursing Program, and we probably had 25 or 30 applicants come in over the last year, students coming in over the last few years. We always meet with them at the end of their clinical experience to see how it's going, and we always ask the question, 'How many of you are planning to go into long-term care after graduation?' And we have yet to have the first hand go up. So, the people that we are getting don't want to be in our world." | Central |