Hospice facilities are also not immune to the staffing shortages that plague the healthcare industry. They have had to redeploy workers to fill vacancies, provide overtime pay and bring in expensive temporary help, and even turn patients away.

At worst, they can’t get nurses to comfort them or their families at the bedside of a dying patient.

“Every day is basically a logistical and tactical exercise to make sure we identify our resources and deploy our resources to the bedside,” said Dean Forman, chief operating officer of Chapters Health System in Florida, a community-based Foundational nonprofit nursing facility delivery system. “Anyone will be lying to you if they say we haven’t had an incident or two that we regret.”

Like many other healthcare sectors, hospice has struggled to attract workers, even before the COVID-19 pandemic caused an exodus of health workers. Few nurses go directly to palliative or hospice care outside of school. Often, they start in other fields such as medicine, surgery, oncology or emergency departments, and move into hospice after gaining experience with death or seeing firsthand how hospice care works, Forman said. Certified nursing assistants are being drawn to high-paying jobs outside of medicine.

“There is a [registered nurse] The shortage before the pandemic, now it’s steroids,” said Carol Fisher, president of the National Partnership for Innovation in Healthcare and Hospice.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment of registered nurses will grow by 9% from 2020 to 2030, the highest of any occupation, and there will be 194,500 new job openings each year. The data is not broken down by specialty, but as the U.S. population ages, post-acute care nurses are expected to be in high demand.

The quality of care could suffer due to worker shortages, said Caitlin Donovan, senior director of public relations at the National Foundation for the Advocacy of Patients.

“When you have low staffing levels, you have less one-on-one attention to each patient,” Donovan said.

In some cases, shelters such as the Grande Ronde Hospital and Clinic in La Grande, Oregon have had to close the door Because of the shortage of manpower. Industry insiders say most organisations have been able to mobilise staff to care for their patients, but this has overburdened the remaining staff physically and emotionally.

“It’s not easy to work emotionally all day long with people and their families who are dealing with the grief of the loss of a loved one,” said Dr. “drug.

Rebecca Jensen, a registered nurse and director of inpatient units at LifePath Hospice, which is part of Chapters Health System, said workers have turned to on-site licensed clinical social workers and bereavement teams in the building to help them. Coping with burnout and the emotional cost of work.

Jensen, who nearly lost her husband to COVID-19, said it was “heartbreaking” to see her staff battle the pandemic.

Develop the workforce
To help address staffing issues, Calvary Hospital in New York City recently established a palliative care nurse residency program with a grant from the Cabrini Mothers Health Foundation.Nurses start out in inpatient care and then move into a community setting six months later, said Nancy D’Agostino, vice president of community patient services at Calvary Hospital, where she oversees. [email protected]home care and hospice services in hospitals.

“We hope that by the end of the year we will have eight new nurses,” D’Agostino said.

Grant funding helped build the program’s curriculum, D’Agostino said. The system intends to continue the program after nurses complete their first year.

“We’re really challenged because unless we have nurses to take care of them, we can’t accommodate the increase in referrals,” D’Agostino said.

Calvary had to turn away patients, especially during the winter omicron surge, when many health care workers were sick, including 40 percent of Calvary’s hospice and home care workers.

“It stopped suddenly,” she said.

People aren’t being discharged from hospitals because shelters across the city don’t have any availability, she said.

“It’s really a domino effect,” D’Agostino said.

Flexibility is the key

Calvary and other hospice organizations are also offering greater flexibility to workers’ schedules to help attract and retain workers. As Aspire Health’s Friedman saw, patients need 24/7 care, so there’s always a shift that works for someone.

Hospice facilities have also turned to virtual care to address staffing shortages. While CNAs are required to visit patients in person, other members of the clinical team, such as nurses or doctors, can conduct virtual visits, Friedman said.The facility provides other services such as Grief Counselingexpand their reach online.

Keith Ashmus, who lives in the Cleveland area, has been providing grief counseling through hospice since his wife Marie died last year of multiple system atrophy. Despite the surge in COVID-19 cases, he is still able to attend individual and group meetings via Zoom.

Organizations must be more competitive in wages to attract nurses and other workers to hospice, which can be difficult for facilities with thin margins, Friedman said.

“Many of our hospice organizations don’t have access to the vast resources that large hospital systems have,” Friedman said. “It can be quite daunting for an organization to increase wages.”

Karen Rubel, president and CEO of Nathan Adelson Hospice Las Vegas, expects things to improve.

“The rates we’re trying to compete with won’t last forever, and we don’t think they will. It’s just in response to the pandemic and people leaving the labor market,” Rubell said. “I think we’re going to see this tapering off that we’ve been dealing with.”

Hospice organizations need more federal funding through Medicare, said Edo Banach, president and CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

“In order to recruit and retain talent, community providers need to be paid more,” Banach said.