Jake’s House Community Residence

Jake’s House Community Residence in Lucan, Ontario, is a blended home for people living with autism and seniors who are related to someone on the spectrum or have experience with this condition. It is the first inclusive housing facility of its kind in the province, and its focus is providing a safe place for residents to live healthy and happy lives.

The management team at Jake’s House in Lucan prides themselves on the fact that their organization is considered a "nice place to work" for healthcare workers, where they feel valued and encouraged to provide their best service to residents.

The home is currently going through an expansion process, with new residents moving in every week. As a result, they project a continuous growth of their workforce in the next months to satisfy the higher demand for caregiving services.

The Challenge

Jake’s House in Lucan is in constant recruitment of new healthcare workers such as personal support workers (PSWs), developmental services workers (DSWs), nurses, and other support staff, especially after the pandemic started, when they were unable to rely on volunteers anymore for health and safety reasons. However, their past recruitment process was time-consuming and made it difficult for them to anticipate the outcomes, as they had little control over it.

On top of that, management explained how they have certain standards for staff and a very specific work culture where not all healthcare workers would be a good fit, but the platforms they were using in the past didn’t allow them to search for candidates with certain traits and qualifications. Consequently, they had to rely on widespread job postings that were usually answered by unqualified or uninterested people, and others who didn’t live within commuting distance from their facilities. This situation constantly stalled their recruitment process.

Read More: Healthcare Industry Trends You Need to Know

The Solution

Caring Support, with its unique design and features, was able to completely revolutionize the recruitment process at Jake’s House Community Residence.

The platform allowed their management to:

Access a large healthcare worker database, filtering their search by location, experience level, and qualifications. This immediately made their efforts less time-consuming.

Stop relying on job postings and instead regain control of their recruitment by reaching out to potential candidates directly through the in-app messaging feature and presenting them with the opportunity to interview for a position at their facilities.

Develop a more active recruiting format that skipped several of the steps in their past strategy. This possibility helped them gain more control over their process and be able to better anticipate their outcomes.

The Result

To this date, Jake’s House Community Residences in Lucan, ON has hired 7+ healthcare workers through Caring Support and has made the platform their main source to find qualified staff and in the future, volunteers as well.

What It's Like Being A Healthcare Worker During A Pandemic

As a healthcare worker, the COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on all of us, but apart from the families that have lost loved ones in this global health crisis, nobody has suffered more than healthcare workers around the world. Here in Canada, where the virus has infected 1.2 million people to this date, including almost half a million in Ontario; healthcare workers report being exhausted and sometimes discouraged, but they also demonstrate their strength and resilience, which is why they have earned the respect of patients and their family members more than ever before.

In this special article, we have gathered the testimonies of six local healthcare workers, who told us what it is really like to be a part of the medical field and work as a healthcare worker during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Covid has ruined most of our lives and has affected me personally on a day-to-day basis at work by these unnecessary lockdowns. Being a frontline worker, I have seen firsthand the rise of unemployment, depression, and suicide attempts. Also the rise of murders, domestic violence, and lastly opiate consumption causing deaths.

This has affected my attitude at work. I feel defeated as if no one is listening; as if you are immediately discredited when you attempt to become a voice for these people in poverty, victims of violence and addiction because I feel this pandemic is much more important to those who matter more (geriatric demographic with generational wealth and influence).

This virus is serious, do not get me wrong, it is fatal and it is unbiased on whom it affects, but who these lockdowns affect most is targeted, alienating, and much more harmful than we could possibly imagine” – Paramedic from London, Ontario.

“The most difficult part of my work as a healthcare worker during COVID-19 would have to be having to work short-handed constantly. Staff is either calling in sick with symptoms or taking leaves of absence due to stress. This increases the workload immensely and I think that it has affected me emotionally. I also feel very empathetic towards my patients who are alone in the hospital during their stays without any visitors allowed." – Registered Nurse at the London Health Science Centre.

“Prior to COVID-19, I felt confident in my skills, ability, knowledge, and eagerness to improve my care and performance. No matter what the situation or medical issue was, I either knew how to handle it or knew what other resources to access if I didn’t have the answers or solution.

Source: https://www.caringsupport.com/blog/success-story-jakes-house-community-residence