changing with the times

[mwilhite]

I work for a locally owned home health agency who has been in business for almost 30 years. We are 1 of 2 in the town are locally owned

We have acquired nurses from various home health agencies and obtained "best practices" from them on staffing, documentation requirements, education, and etc. We are finding ourselves in a position where we are unable to obtain some of the nurses that we really really want because we cannot offer them the salaries that the big corporate home health agencies can offer.

We are looking to be creative in how we staff and what are expectations are so we can still provide excellent care, but be profitable so we can raise peoples salaries and offer larger salaries to the qualified applicants.

My question is how are your agencies staffed, what are the documentation completion requirements, do you use LVNs, or just RNs, do you require the nurses to document in the home or immediately after the visit? Any help is useful!

Thank you!

[BBP42]

I work for a large VNA associated with a major hospital system. In my job, one RN/LPN pair manages a caseload of approx 30 patients in a specific territory, with the RN assigned to admits, recerts, discharges, post fall assessments, post ER visit assessments etc and LPN seeing pts who need routine care. We are expected to email a brief report to our manager daily and cc each other so we stay up to date on all of our patients. We are encouraged to document in the home as much as possible but documentation is due by start of next business day. They do not do "no documentation, no payment for visit", it is just a requirement of the job and someone who cannot get this done will no longer have a job. We are regularly assigned to education sessions and our patient load for the day is adjusted accordingly.