CellTrak Blog

With a skyrocketing 65% turnover rate for personal care aides, a double-digit nurse turnover rate and a low unemployment rate, home care agencies face massive challenges with retention and employee churn.

As a caregiver shortage looms over the home care industry, Millennials are increasingly filling the gap. It’s a great solution for building out an agency’s staff, but it often presents an entirely new set of challenges: Agencies now need to figure out how to manage this generation of employees.

If your agency doesn’t yet have a plan for holding onto your most talented caregivers, you could be in trouble. With turnover rates exceeding 65 percent and a potentially disastrous caregiver shortage looming, employee retention is one of the biggest challenges the in-home care industry faces.

As a result, agencies are scrambling to figure out how to make their employees happier, without breaking the budget. And they’re increasingly finding success from a surprising source: Technology.

As the demand for home health care has skyrocketed, the need for home health aides is projected to grow more than 48% between 2012 and 2022. Agencies are struggling to keep up, and increasingly, they’re turning to immigrant workers. In fact, of the approximately 1.4 million home care workers today, nearly 550,000 are immigrants.

While this workforce segment is filling critical vacancies in the industry, it also presents a unique challenge to agency owners: How can agencies successfully manage a workforce of non-native English speakers? How can agencies integrate these diverse backgrounds into a cohesive agency culture?

Have you ever contemplated the risks your remote workers face when they provide home health services? In 2010, the health care and social assistance industry reported 653,900 cases of injuries and illnesses — more than any other private industry sector reported. Can your employees avoid being the next case?

As the market for home care services continues growing at a rapid clip, agencies are finding it tougher to find and keep qualified caregivers. According to a recent survey by CareInHomes Caregivers, 76% of private duty agencies were looking to hire more caregivers this year, and the trend points to that continuing in 2017. But along with that opportunity come significant challenges. In that same survey, the respondents said their two greatest challenges were:

In August, the Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an information bulletin on “Suggested Approaches for Strengthening and Stabilizing the Medicaid Home Care Workforce.” With home care services growing rapidly, the CMS recognizes the need to also care for the workforce that is delivering home-based care.