By Diane West

Your caregivers are pivotal to your company’s success as they represent your company in the community.  They are one of your most important marketing tools.  However, it just takes one unpleasant experience with a caregiver to financially hurt your company and damage your reputation and credibility within your community.  Both of which will cost you time and money to get your business back on the right track and rebuild your credibility.

Several months ago, we wrote about an unfortunate experience in Connecticut where an independent caregiver hired directly by a family was arrested for identify theft after defrauding the family of over $150,000.  The irony of this situation is that this caregiver had been previously terminated by a local home health agency for stealing from a patient.

What you know about your job candidates is important, but what you don’t know may be even more important.  At Leading Home Care and Caregiver Quality Assurance, we recommend that every company conduct criminal background checks on every candidate before making the final hiring offer.

To help you do a better job of checking the background of your job candidates, we have developed an affiliation with National Crime Search, a highly reputable and effective background search company to help you conduct those checks.  We encourage you to check out the services of National Crime Search, and combine this service with the online pre-employment assessments from Caregiver Quality Assurance to make better hires of higher quality caregivers.

As we always say, “talent wins and wins consistently in private duty home care”.  Hiring only the highest quality caregivers is your key to long term future success.