How to Reinforce, Expand the Home Healthcare Nursing Workforce
As home healthcare solidifies into a fixture of the healthcare system, payers and providers need to consider how they will support the present and future home healthcare nursing workforce.
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- As home healthcare expanded during the coronavirus pandemic, the home healthcare nursing workforce had to grow with it. As the nation emerges from the pandemic, healthcare leaders must discern how to retain and develop this field.
After nearly 35 years as a registered nurse working in various environments from acute care to long-term care, Kathy Driscoll, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Humana Inc., told Healthcare Strategies that she has learned some of her best nursing lessons in the home healthcare space.
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But this practice is facing major challenges in the 2020s. The first problem is keeping present home healthcare nurses in the home healthcare workforce. The second problem is effectively investing in the student pipeline to supplement the home healthcare nursing workforce as burnt-out and retiring nurses leave the field.
Large payers, like Humana, and large provider organizations can help expose more students to the home healthcare nursing workforce through well-placed investments.
“For organizations like ours, I think it's about being very intentional about that partnership and doing things like creating more clinical rotations in home health. Currently, we have about 40 colleges and universities of all sizes that we have nursing students who are coming and spending time in the fields with us, finding out what it really looks like, what it feels like,” Driscoll said.
On top of clinical rotations, payers and providers can invest in virtual learning opportunities for students to acclimate to the home healthcare environment.
For the active home healthcare nursing workforce, Driscoll urged the healthcare industry to develop a supportive work culture. This is achievable by including the home healthcare nurses in the overall organization’s activities and team-building opportunities and listening to what nurses need.
“One of the things that we hear loud and clear—maybe the pandemic brought this out, but we hear it from nurses across our organization and really in healthcare—is the value that nurses place on flexibility,” Driscoll shared.
“Really paying attention to emotional mental health, paying attention to flexibility, really tying what nurses do to the value that they bring, because nurses in any practice setting bring tremendous value. I think those are all lessons that we've learned from the pandemic or perhaps have been magnified by experiences during the pandemic.”
