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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.
| "What we've found is that people are graduating with the practical nursing, and then pursuing their RN degree quickly. So, the turnover and replacement is pretty frequent in our long-term care and home health care setting with the LPNs. That's where we've seen challenges. That's great career growth for the individual, but it's just a challenge from the employer perspective." | Southeast |
| "It's difficult to convince new graduates that the long-term care work with the geriatric populations is a place where their skills are going to be utilized. They are not going to be narrowly focused in terms of their skill set—they're actually going to use all of their assessment skills and all of their nursing skills. I think there's a misconception that, in long-term care, that your practice becomes very narrow. It's not an accurate reflection of how it really is. That makes it difficult to hire." | Southeast |
| "I don't know that in higher education there's much emphasis on geriatrics or gerontology. I think most of the nurses are trained in acute care and then, when they get into the long-term setting, we have to train them on geriatric care, hospice care, how to do rehab, and how to work with therapists. It just doesn't seem like they come out ready for long-term care." | Southeast |
| "I would agree that the curriculum doesn't prepare the nurses for long-term care and I think we, as long-term care providers, would be willing to be a resource to the colleges if they wanted some help in offering a course or at least getting more knowledge in that." | Southeast |
| "There are some areas—including senior services—where it's a little bit more difficult to attract in general across the field." | Southeast |
| "In our business sector, in senior services, we're not a glamorous place to work. And often senior services organizations aren't able to pay the same rate that some acute organizations will. We're fortunate in being part of a non-profit health organization. But when I hear from other organizations, often you can see quite a gap between what a long-term care facility can offer versus the acute side. The other issue is whether you're considered urban or rural because those areas are paid differently by the state. You don't make that decision yourself about what you reimburse. So, those constraints are really a problem for people. Even being able to pay—even if they would like to pay their staff more—often they just can't in a rural organization versus an urban organization. Here in Winona, we are reimbursed less from the state than we would be in Rochester because Rochester is considered urban. So, those are challenges that we have behind the scenes in terms of attracting people. And that is eventually going to really be a challenge for the future. Because you certainly know that we're probably going to serve institutionally—we're going to serve them in the community—but we still need people available to do that. So we're going to have to figure out how we're going to face those challenges in going forward and still figure out our model of care. We're changing a lot of that. But how are we going to pay them competitively in order to make that work?" | Southeast |
| "As health care changes and as senior care changes and we see more of a shift towards community-based care, I guess the concern is that there is a gap in terms of the need for more registered nursing assistants. And, as the other respondent pointed out, there is the issue of reimbursements as well." | Southeast |
| "Long-term care, I think, represented over half the folks that attended these meetings, which was delightful because the data now is going to reflect a more broad-based acute and older adult services perspective." | Southeast |