It seems like everything these days requires a value proposition to be appealing. What can we add to an experience or a product to make it better and one-up the competition?
It’s a question being considered before anything new takes flight, and heaven forbid you want to sink money into reengineering something old-school.
But the bigger issue to me, and I’d say, our healthcare system, is that very few people still value the things our society has traditionally valued.
Reading those words as I typed them out, I felt myself age by a good two decades. But hear me out. I’m not talking about religion or politics or even family values, a phrase I couldn’t seem to escape as a teenager growing up in the 1990s.
No, I’m talking about the way we value (or don’t) many of our nation’s long-respected professional roles.
Just as workers have turned to the gig economy in their quest for more flexibility and a better balance between their personal and professional lives, many college students and younger adults are rejecting the caring professions America relies upon.
Entrepreneurship rules the day, and for many, that career pathway doesn’t include a stop in any service industry, in a nursing home or elsewhere.
As interest in healthcare, teaching, law enforcement and similar careers shrinks, we’re experiencing major gaps in service delivery — for the very services that were once considered the crux of our communities, with the most dependable and often most-emulated workers around.
Think about the nursing programs you used to depend on, now shuttered or a ghost of their former selves because they’ve lost too many faculty members or proctors.
That same thing is happening across university campuses as interest in many service careers shifts toward higher paying and sometimes more creative and self-led jobs. Earlier this week, a parents group for pre-college students that I follow featured a post from a history professor begging for parents to encourage their kids to reconsider careers in history and teaching. His department, drawing far fewer majors year after year, is being decimated and faculty are hard-pressed to find new jobs.
Teachers now battle school boards and parents unwilling to let educators be educators. Why would a teen growing up in the middle of that want to stay involved in it?
Likewise, we have EMT, 911 dispatch and law enforcement shortages because those fields lost much of their glory-day grandeur amid a series of ugly events that degraded public respect for such roles. Who among us would want to risk their life on a regular basis in that climate and with so little thanks, even when you’re the one doing things right?
Nursing, in that vein, is no different.
Yes, respondents still tell Gallup they trust their nurses more than any other professional. But when it comes down to it, nurses just don’t feel valued the way they did in the past, either by their employers or by the public. That leaves far fewer of them willing to instill both the caregiving fundamentals and the passion for the job that previous generations got from experienced nurse faculty.
The rhetoric from the White House and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (and their bedfellows at several national unions) haven’t helped sell the public on the wonderful possibilities of a career in long-term care.
And this is where Garry Pezzano, president and CEO of LeadingAge PA, says CMS may be most blind in its quest to impose staffing mandates on nursing homes. Not only are workers not available today, the nation’s shifting values means they likely won’t be there for years to come.
“What we’re finding is that they want flexibility in their lives, and we need academia to kind of really catch up to that,” Pezzano told me as we discussed major staffing shortages in his state. “We’re talking to our academic partners about, can you consider things like waving registration fees? Can you think more in terms of a hybrid model for delivering the education and just attracting folks to the field? … We’ve got such burnout in healthcare. We don’t have enough people seeing it as a viable career.”
As Pezzano reminds us, not only do jobs need to become more enticing, but so do the training programs that turn employees from workers into career-oriented team members. Nursing homes must be once again seen by the outside world as offering safe, supportive and fulfilling careers.
Let’s hope CMS works some magic to turn its $75 million budget for building a long-term care nursing pipeline into some kind of mega value-add that delivers way beyond its funding level.
Kimberly Marselas is senior editor of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.
