Turnover of caregivers in the home are industry has increased dramatically over the past four years.  That’s having a negative impact on many home care companies across the country.

Industry turnover

2009 – 39.4%
2010 – 46.2%
2011 – 49.8%
2012 – 52.6%

Research by Leading Home Care and Caregiver Quality Assurance shows that in a typical home care company, each caregiver who leaves costs you $1,506.96. If you have 100 caregivers and 52 of them leave, that will cost you $78,361.90

We started Caregiver Quality Assurance in 2006 because at that time, the biggest barrier to growing a home care company was a shortage of high quality caregivers.  After the economy tanked in 2008, it became less of a problem.

Now, with the economy rebounding, turnover increasing, and home care companies growing like crazy, the availability of caregivers will again be a strategic issue for most companies. According to the 2013 Private Duty Benchmarking Study, 617 companies who participated in this year’s study showed the following impact of caregiver shortages:

• We did not experience any caregiver shortages – 9.6%
• No Impact – 9.2%
• Very little negative impact – 27.7%
• Somewhat negative impact – 34.6%
• Very negative impact – 15.4%
• Extremely negative impact – 3.5%

So with 53.5% of all companies feeling some impact of caregiver shortages, this shows a new trend in the industry and one that we all need to be thinking about.   What will you do in the coming year to reduce turnover, improve recruiting, and increase caregiver satisfaction.

One step is to begin conducting caregiver satisfaction surveys.  You don’t know what your caregivers are thinking unless you ask them.  You may want to consider contacting Home Care Pulse to explore the use of their caregiver satisfaction survey as a tool to help improve retention.  We also know that when you have a high level of caregiver satisfaction, client satisfaction goes up as well.

The other thing you want to is provide training for your office staff;  you recruiter, your scheduler, and your care coordinator on steps they can take to improve recruiting, selection, and retention.  Once each month Caregiver Quality Assurance provides a live web conference on a related topic.

Coming up in the next three months:

• May 9, 2013 – “Calculating the Cost of a Bad Hire”
• June 13, 2013 – “Six Things You Need to Know about Criminal Background Checks” with Travis Fink and McKensie Piepho from National Crime Search. 
• July 11, 2013 – “Servant Leadership in Private Duty Home Care” – with Elizabeth Jeffries, RN, CSP, CPAE

The more your office staff members know about recruiting, selection, training, and retention, the more profitable your home care business will be.