Long-term care providers have a lot to be grateful for and, no, this isn’t an early start on a perfunctory Thanksgiving column.
What I mean is that nursing home operators have a lot of people at the edges of the sector who care a lot about what they are doing, and how they’re doing it. Place academic researchers at, or at least near, the top of that list.
Depending on the results, and one’s point of view, of course, that can have either really good or bad consequences.
Stepping back a bit, sometimes these incredibly intelligent teams might make you wonder what they’re making such a fuss aboutl. That could have happened with study results released just this week. The findings, in a nutshell: Higher nursing home employee turnover is probably a negative influence on patient outcomes.
Who’d have thunk it?
Well before you grab your skewers to chase down these intrepid investigators, you should know that there are also insightful nuances to the overall findings. These researchers are applying some pretty cool math to the jobs that you do. In fact, a relatively small group of degreed scientists, in various permutations, has completed numerous beneficial, scientific studies recently in this field.
And remember, too, that none of these works have come anything close to the infamous investigations into cow flatulence. And none compare to these head-shaking actual academic investigations in recent years: “The nature of navel fluff,” “Swearing as a response to pain” and “A healthy diet will help you live longer.”
And then there’s this stunner, as reported in the New York Times: “Exercise makes our muscles work better with age.”
Who’d have thunk it, indeed.
Luckily, the long-term care studies we’ve come across lately lay out road maps for leaders, frontline workers and government regulators.
That includes the study released this week titled “Health Care Staff Turnover and Quality of Care in Nursing Homes.” Could lots of turnover be good? Of course not.
That’s just what the researchers found. But they also quantified how damaging it could be to lose long-time or even mid-length staff.
Score one for the incumbents.
In an unexpected bonus, also score one for opponents of the controversial proposed nursing home staffing mandate.
A member of the “turnover” study team noted to McKnight’s Long-Term Care News that findings clearly indicate that staffing mandate advocates should remember that more is not always better. More of the right kind is, however.
“We should be thinking about staffing consistency and retention just as much as overall staffing levels,” study results suggest, said Brian McGarry, PhD, one of investigation team members.
He and his colleagues were so enamored with the value of existing employees, in fact, they made a handful of recommendations that included considering bonus pay for using long-tenured staff and “increasing the prominence” of staff tenure figures and experience in Nursing Home Compare.
The concept of quality over quantity. A winner yet again. No small thanks to a research team playing in the PhD league.
James M. Berklan is McKnight’s Executive Editor.
Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.
