Caregiver Scheduling: Ensuring Consistent Care

If your task is caregiver scheduling, you know how vital scheduling consistency can help the residents of your long-term care (LTC) facility avoid feeling overwhelmed, confused, or unhappy.  

Many national organizations recognize that consistent nursing home staff assignment is an essential strategy for improving residents’ quality of care and quality of life, and have made it a central plan to improve nursing home environments.  

Throughout the USA, long-term care facilities are on the route to transformation—slowly shifting from the traditional, institutional model to a person-centered care model that focuses on residents’ preferences and routines. 

How the more robust bonds of individualized care support better outcomes 

The practice of consistent caregiver scheduling with individual residents can lead to a better quality of care outcomes, healthier relationships between staff and residents, and a more stable and committed workforce.  

If you strive to have the same caregiver attend to the same patient, know that consistent caregiver scheduling and individualized care:  

• Provide residents with stability.

   Caregivers gain a deep understanding of meeting the resident’s unique needs and creating a daily routine. Daily routine includes dressing, bathing, or other activities of daily living.

• Help residents avoid social isolation.

   When one caregiver tends to the same resident throughout the day, including mealtimes, the focused attention creates meaningful and lasting social engagement and bonding. This engagement helps residents avoid isolation and loneliness, which can lead to a decline in their physical and mental well-being. 

Empower your staff and business with better caregiver scheduling. 

Compassion and satisfied residents and families are a top priority for long-term care facilities. As Modern Healthcare has noted, nursing home residents always rate relationships with caregivers as extremely important to them.  

But the facilities that employ consistent assignments gain another important benefit: A competitive edge in a tough market filled with other options and savvy shoppers who often look closely at ratings and outcome measures before choosing a facility.  

To ensure they gain that competitive edge, many LTC facilities turn to technology for the caregiver schedule they need, including: 

• Technology tools include up-to-date caregiver scheduling software with optimization algorithms.

  The algorithms can schedule consistent care, ensuring the same caregiver attends to the same patient each day.  

• Tools designed to enable compliance with states’ regulatory and labor provisions.

   This functionality allows for better caregiver scheduling, innovative ways to fill schedules early, reduced staffing costs by avoiding paying out scheduling bonuses, compliance with state staffing-level regulations, compliance with staff screening, time savings, simplified processes, and better schedule tracking. 

Nursing homes that begin using consistent assignment may need to change the way they manage staff. Still, the right tools enable everyone on your team to come up to speed quickly so that they can catch medical problems in the early, treatable stages. 

The ShiftMed app supports optimal outcomes with algorithms that ensure consistent care and better health outcomes. Contact ShiftMed today for more information.