The role of empowered local leadership is emerging as a critical driver of success for many nursing home providers.
Rick Forscutt, CEO of Priority Management, said that for his company greater involvement of local leadership has been an important move for not only improving hiring and retaining staff but containing costs as well.
Despite the challenging staffing crisis, empowering local skilled nursing facility (SNF) leaders to make business decisions became Priority Management’s mantra for success. Forscutt’s innovative strategy involved engaging facility administrators directly in the recruitment and onboarding process.
“Involving administrators in the interview process and having them personally interview candidates for various positions helps establish a strong relationship right from the start,” he said.
Founded in 2006, Priority Management operates skilled nursing facilities, assisted living, and long-term acute care hospitals in Louisiana and Texas.
Forscutt added that this focus on relationships has made a significant difference in attracting and retaining talent in the highly competitive industry.
“We have realized that staff members who have good relationships with their managers or facility administrators tend to stay around much longer,” he said. “In the past, we may have considered onboarding, hiring, and candidate responses as the sole responsibility of HR directors or staffing coordinators, assuming that it was working well.”
However, Forscutt said that his team learned that involving administrators directly yields better results, especially in the context of the staffing crisis.
“By tapping into administrators’ personal involvement, such as managing online job postings and directly contacting candidates, we have been able to establish stronger connections and increase our success in attracting and retaining quality staff,” he said.
And Forscutt is not alone in promoting the model of more empowered local leadership.
Joseph Lee, who oversees Clinical and Compliance Support Services at PACS, said that he leverages local leaders to help with the hiring process as well by encouraging administrators to invite their friends and colleagues to tour facilities.
“We have the ability right now to train [personnel on] anything, where we find all these persons that want to come into this industry. So our administrators have liked to say, ‘Come and see what I do,’ to their friends and most people can’t believe it until they come and see the building.”
Empowering local leaders to make contract decisions
Forscutt said that by allowing facility level teams to make vendor decisions instead of trying to negotiate blanket corporate contracts, Priority has been able to save costs and improve patient care.
“When a corporation wants all of its 30 buildings to use a specific food vendor, pharmacy consultant, or patient supply vendor, we often think that if we negotiate and get the best price, everything must be going well in the field,” he said. “However, upon closer investigation, we’ve found that those corporate contracts weren’t really working as intended in the field.”
Forscutt said that facility-level teams are often hesitant to make changes because they may not have had the authority to do so in the past. But, he sees benefits to give local leadership control over such matters as vendor relationships.
“We’ve empowered them to make vendor changes on their own without relying on a corporate-mandated vendor,” he said. “This has allowed them to get better service, enhance patient care, and often save costs. So, that would be one great example of how we’re empowering leaders to make better business decisions at the facility level.”
Using administrators to help with transitions
Accolade Healthcare, a provider of care across six skilled nursing facilities in central Illinois, is using empowered local leadership to help with expansion efforts. The company recently acquired a distressed skilled nursing facility in Champaign County.
Freedman said that while he had been expecting mixed reactions from current staff, he and his team were pleasantly surprised.
“They were just so elated to just know that there was going to be a certain level of communication and organization that they’ve been yearning for,” he said. “We kind of assumed that there’d be a lot of employees that were just really not cut out for getting the highest level of patient care, but it really couldn’t be further from the truth. It really was just upper management, previous upper management, that really wasn’t focused on that building, and it showed the second we got there.”
And as for replacing leadership, Freedman made sure Accolade Healthcare drew from local SNF leaders. He knew that he would need strong local leaders in the area to make a strong transition.
“We moved one of our strong administrators who didn’t live in the area, but built his position with another administrator, and we moved him down there because he really understands the Accolade way,” he said.
“We had hired a regional director of nursing in anticipation that whether or not there was a director of nursing there with the compliance issues, we would have to have somebody dedicated to that building for a period of time to get it reorganized.”
