By Robert
Holly | June 2, 2020 geralt/Pixabay | CC0
Some in-home care providers have struggled to
stay in business over the past few months. Yet others have thrived amid the
coronavirus, creating new service lines from scratch and carving out niche
roles with nontraditional partners.
Totowa, New Jersey-based The Senior Company
falls into the second category.
Founded in 2018, The Senior Company normally
provides private-pay home health and home care services across the state of New
Jersey, caring for roughly 150 to 300 active clients on any given day. After
the coronavirus evolved into a national crisis, however, The Senior Company
also launched a dedicated staffing business to support local nursing homes.
And the company has nearly doubled its overall
business as a result.
“We got a call from a major nursing facility
that serves all the big New Jersey counties. They said, ‘Hey, we’re in trouble.
Can you help?’” Steve Romano, president and CEO of The Senior Company, told
Home Health Care News. “And we said, ‘Sure.’ We had literally nobody who worked
facilities at that time.”
Since the initial outbreak at a long-term care
facility in Kirkland, Washington, the coronavirus has continued to devastate
nursing homes, along with their residents and staff.
As of June 2, more than 107,000 people had
died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to statistics from Johns Hopkins
University. Newly released federal data shows that nursing home residents
account for nearly 26,000 of those deaths.
“Nursing homes have been ground zero for
COVID-19,” U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
Administrator Seema Verma said in April.
CMS and the Trump administration have taken
several steps to control the spread of the virus in nursing homes, including
the implementation of new reporting requirements and stronger infection-control
protocols. Despite those efforts and other attempts to deliver personal
protective equipment (PPE) and COVID-19 testing supplies, many facilities —
often shorthanded — continue to report new cases on a daily basis.
That’s where The Senior Company jumps in.
After the in-home care provider received that
initial call from a nursing home, it began an aggressive campaign to hire, vet
and onboard dozens of new caregivers to deploy into nursing homes across New
Jersey, according to Romano.
At the same time, the provider also put in an
expedited request with the state for a formal staffing license.
“We got that approved within a day,” Romano
said.
Doubling down
The Senior Company has experienced steady
growth since launching in 2018. As is common for any new business, though,
there have been bumps in the road that Romano and his leadership team have had
to navigate.
“We adapt really well. We learn really well,”
Romano said. “When you build a company, especially a home health company or
something that’s so intricate, it’s hard to get it all right immediately, so
you need to be nimble.”
That ability to adapt on the fly has been
essential for The Senior Company while launching a nursing home staffing
business from scratch — and dealing with coronavirus disruption, more globally.
“I don’t want to say we were ready for the
coronavirus,” Romano said. “But when it did come, I was happy to see that we
were able to adjust so quickly because of our other experiences.”
Since agreeing to staff that first nursing
home, The Senior Company has struck agreements with 17 additional facilities.
To meet that demand, the in-home care provider has hired about 150 caregivers
specifically for its facility staffing business.
That’s about how many workers The Senior
Company has on the in-home care side.
In part, the in-home care provider has been
able to find those new caregivers for its staffing business because of the
competitive compensation it offers, Calvin Bynum, executive director of The
Senior Company, told HHCN.
In most cases, The Senior Care offers pay
that’s about 30% to 35% above the industry standard.
The Senior Company’s hiring efforts have also
likely been helped by record levels of unemployment, which isn’t expected to
drop anytime soon.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently
projected that the U.S. unemployment rate will be 11.7% in the fourth quarter
of 2020. While that’s lower than what the unemployment rate was in April,
14.7%, it’s still higher than any point since the Great Depression.
“A lot of people are going out of work and
filing unemployment claims. A lot of people aren’t able to pay bills,” Bynum
said. “While that’s happening, we’ve ramped up pay. We’ve ramped up jobs. We’ve
almost doubled our staff.”
Capturing caregivers
“Capturing a market of caregivers” to work
inside nursing homes amid the coronavirus emergency was one of the most
difficult things The Senior Company has had to do since its formation,
according to Bynum.
To do so, it has focused on being transparent
with staff and ensuring their protection inside facilities.
“[Creating a staffing team] was difficult at
first,” Bynum said. “But we said we weren’t going to try to ‘smoke and mirror’
any employees. We were very transparent about what they were walking into.”
Before entering a facility, The Senior Company
has managers sit down with caregivers to explain the situation inside the
nursing home and verify that the staffers are comfortable with the job.
Staffers then sign a waiver stating they’ve agreed to the assignment.
From there, The Senior Company provides its
nursing home support workers with an initial package of PPE. As part of their
agreements, the nursing home is then responsible for supplying all necessary
PPE moving forward.
“Even some of the bigger home care agencies
have had trouble with staffing because there’s a lot of different personalities
to manage,” Romano said. “We had some pushback to do this, to go and help
people in these facilities. But we really weighed the risk-reward in all
instances, and we’re glad we did it.”
Even before the coronavirus, the health care
staffing space was booming.
In fact, a 2019 report projected that the
global health care staffing market would grow at
a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 5.2% from 2019 to 2026, reaching
the market value of around $45.2 billion by 2026.
As its staffing line continues to grow, The
Senior Company plans to maintain a robust in-home care department, Romano
noted.
“We’re trying to prepare for the expected wave
of discharged hospital patients coming home,” he said. “We have so many people
who have been in facilities for so long. When they start coming home, they’re
going to need help, and we’ll need to have the caregivers ready.”
Finding a niche
Toward the end of May, the federal government
announced the distribution of almost $4.9 billion in COVID-19 relief funds
directly to skilled nursing facilities, the first specific tranche of stimulus
money for the industry since the start of the pandemic.
As part of the relief, each skilled nursing
facility in the country will receive a baseline payment of
$50,000, plus an additional $2,500 per bed, according to the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS).
The support might further fuel staffing
arrangements with in-home care providers.
Alternatively, it could also prompt some
nursing homes to keep services in-house.
“I think it could have two possible effects,”
Bynum said. “One, a nursing home could get the money and continue to utilize
our services longer. Or, two, they could take that money and raise the pay for
their current employees, which would incentivize them to come back and start
working, meaning they wouldn’t need us as much.”
The former scenario is the likeliest, the
executive directed said.
Of course, it’s not just The Senior Company
that has carved out an innovative, niche role amid the coronavirus. Sunrise,
Florida-based Interim HealthCare Inc. and Cincinnati-based FirstLight Home Care
have likewise found staffing opportunities within senior living communities and
long-term care facilities, for example.
“We are probably running a 18% to 20% increase
in hours per week purely from staffing requests from facilities,” FirstLight
CEO Jeff Bevis previously told HHCN.
Peter Ross, CEO and co-founder of
Maryland-based Senior Helpers, similarly noted during an HHCN webinar that his
organization has found new roles linked to the coronavirus.
“We’ve seen new types of services that we’re
doing in home care, where you now are servicing plants [using us] as the
temperature-control checkers,” Ross said. “We are starting to see some of those
services request ramp up, even different kinds of services that we weren’t
doing before. It’s really not … gushing through through the door, but at the
same time, it’s definitely picking up.”
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