Long Term Care Reflection

About 8 months ago my department attempted to come up with a solution to a problem. We are a home health agency and my department was the Long Term Care department. We employ caregivers to visit clients who receive services through the Medicaid Waiver program. There is always a shortage of caregivers, chronically. The idea was that we would look at the areas where clients were to try to group specific caregivers in those areas. This would reduce travel time and possibly allow a caregiver to stop in and see a client if there was a last minute need as well. This plan was an innovative idea – caregivers went to clients if they had holes in their schedules and would do the care, not because they were in the area. This idea was unique; it …show more content…
to see if we could make a schedule for a caregiver that would not conflict. It seemed like it might work. We had “a quest for a better way” (week 2) in that we needed to be better than the other home health agencies. We needed to be able to supply them with care on a regular basis, not just a fill-in every other day or so, by setting ourselves apart with a better product, we would improve our business. (Week 2 lecture) Nevertheless, in the end, this plan did not work. The manager of the department originally came up with the plan. I was fully behind it and started working on it right away. My co-worker, a woman who had been with the company for over 26 years, did not think it would work. She would have no part of it. She is the type of person who says, “We tried that before and it didn’t work” about every new idea. It was discouraging; I really wanted it to work. So eventually, it was too much for me to do alone and we abandoned the project. It was disappointing. The manager kept asking about it. She felt frustrated at our lack of progress but she was afraid to make my co-worker do anything. She felt intimidated by my co-worker’s longevity. It was a