Helpful Tips

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You just poured a ton of time and enthusiasm into planning what you believe is a terrific activity for your residents. Then hardly anybody shows up. Where did you go wrong? Check out these eight tips for boosting activity participation at your nursing home:

• Plan a series of activities centered on a theme.

Let’s say your theme is gardening. You might have a guest speaker one day, a trip to a garden center the next day, and a hands-on gardening project the following day. After residents take part in one activity, they look forward to what’s coming next.

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This post may contain affiliate links, and I will be compensated (at no extra cost to you) when you make a purchase by clicking on my links. 

I clearly remember my introduction to the state nursing home survey (inspection) back when I was a brand new nursing assistant:

• Panicked whispers of “surveyors just walked in” spreading through the building like wildfire.
• Poker-faced surveyors lurking in the hallways and writing mysterious notes on their clipboards.
• Deer-in-the-headlights expressions on the faces of staff corned by surveyors and peppered with questions.
• Nursing assistants scattering into residents’ rooms, hoping they wouldn’t be one of the unfortunate souls selected to be watched while bathing a resident.
• Managers praying that they would be far, far away on vacation during the week the surveyors appeared.

[Read more…] about State Inspections: What Volunteers Need To Know

This post may contain affiliate links, and I will be compensated (at no extra cost to you) when you make a purchase by clicking on my links. 

As you can probably guess, I spend a significant amount of time scouring the Internet, looking for new ideas for my blog. So it saddens me greatly when most articles I find about nursing homes focus on abuse, neglect, and lawsuits.

Yes, terrible things have happened in some nursing homes. This is not okay, and these situations need to be corrected.

What the public rarely realizes, however, is that there are many, many excellent nursing homes out there. They employ compassionate, devoted staff who work hard to provide top-notch care for their residents.

[Read more…] about Let’s Be A Positive Voice For Nursing Homes

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We’ve seen a lot in the media recently about the risk of burnout among healthcare professionals. Yet, we sometimes forget that volunteers are vulnerable to burnout, too.

Volunteers interact with residents experiencing pain, people who are dying, residents with challenging behaviors, and families who are hurting.  Besides what they experience at the nursing home, volunteers may also develop stressful issues in their personal lives that compound their risk of burnout.

A regular employee receives a paycheck as a motivation for them to address burnout and stick with their job. A volunteer may find it easier to simply call it quits. Today let’s look at burnout from both the perspective of the volunteer and also the volunteer’s supervisor. After all, we need to find a way to keep those priceless volunteers!

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This post may contain affiliate links, and I will be compensated (at no extra cost to you) when you make a purchase by clicking on my links. 

Did you know that an organization called Independent Sector calculated the value of a volunteer at $29.95 per hour? When I first read that figure, I thought it seemed high. But let’s consider the fact that volunteers don’t receive a salary, insurance benefits, or paid time off. I think you’ll agree that volunteers are worth at least that much!

Besides the monetary value, let’s look at other ways volunteers benefit our nursing homes:

• The staff at a nursing home are very busy. Volunteers have time to do the little extras for the residents that the employees simply can’t fit into their overloaded schedules.

• Volunteers are a source of future staff. I remember several employees who started as volunteers at our nursing home. Later, this experience inspired them to go on to become nurses or nursing assistants.

[Read more…] about What Is The Value Of A Volunteer?