Four Strategies to Support New Home Healthcare Clinicians

New nurses, CNAs, and caregivers can often feel lost and overwhelmed due to the immense responsibility they now hold for sometimes critically ill patients. Lack of proper support through these new challenges can lead to employee burnout, job dissatisfaction, and decreased patient care. There are countless benefits to supporting new clinicians, including increased employee retention, increased employee referrals, and improved patient care.

Home Healthcare Nurse Burnout.

Four strategies to support new clinicians in their new roles:

Make mentoring new clinicians a priority

Have an established clinician with extensive experience be a mentor to new clinicians. Some healthcare settings that have implemented an employee mentor program have noticed a 25% increase in employee retention. When choosing a mentor, find someone with extensive knowledge in the field, excellent problem-solving abilities, communication skills, patience, and empathy (Duquesne University School of Nursing, 2020).

Teach new nurses to keep up with their charting

Did you know that according to the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, humans retain 58% of what they learned after 20 minutes and only 36% after 9 hours? Imagine throwing in a few emergencies and interruptions throughout the day, and that retention rate can drastically reduce, thus leading to poor charting. To prevent this, have the clinician plan in charting time to their day 5- 10 minutes every few hours of just charting, only interruptions for emergencies. Another way to prevent getting behind on charting is to automate as much of their charting as possible. Work with your software company to

Automatically open a documentation window for blood sugar check or pain level when giving insulin or pain medication,

Incorporate triggers that update the care plan for the clinician when they answer an assessment question in a particular way, and,

Provide task alerts for care tasks

Learn more about the benefits of documenting care at the patient’s home for home health care agencies.

Provide quick turnaround for QA of initial notes

Prioritize your QA process to review new employees' notes quickly and more thoroughly. It is easier to stop a habit before it begins. You can set an expectation for charting early.

Some QA validation steps might be available at the bedside employee level and can block the employee from signing their charting without completing chosen documentation steps.

Having complete and thorough charting leads to better patient care and less risk for deficiencies in the survey

Learn more about the 5 steps to improve clinical utilization for home health care agencies.

Create a culture of support and communication

Make supporting a new employee a team approach, not just clinical or HR. Ensure the whole team is aware of a new employee so they can provide additional support during important first tasks such as during the payroll process or logging in questions to the electronic health record. Provide the new employee with the contact information of key people they may reach out to for support. Also, assign experienced caregivers the responsibility of reaching out to the new employee in their first few weeks to check in and see if they have any questions or concerns.