There’s a story going on in the healthcare world that you won’t really find in the mainstream media. But ask a working nurse, nursing home, or assisted living facility employees or two about it, and you’ll get confirmation: healthcare workers are leaving their jobs in hospitals and nursing homes for home-care work. This isn’t a small story that should be dismissed. It says a lot about healthcare jobs going forward, and what healthcare workers desire out of their job most.
And it’s not just job dissatisfaction. The reasons go beyond this into the very nature of that work. It’s even about the relationship of that work with the other portions of our lives.
The Burnout No One Wants to Discuss
Burnout at hospitals is beyond difficult to understand for anyone who’s not working in the healthcare system. Nurses are told to care for between six and eight patients over the course of their shifts, and those patients may often have ongoing, complicated medical issues that require the healthcare provider to constantly be thinking about them and providing care. That’s just the pace of the work; when someone isn’t rushing to help a patient in dire straits, they’re burning out as well.
This is a unique kind of burnout. It’s not just physical. It’s the fear of making a mistake that costs a patient their life multiplied by the number of patients who depend on you at any given moment. After years of this, healthcare workers start to question whether there’s any other way to practice a profession they love.
Homecare is a completely different ballgame. Homecare usually leaves these healthcare providers with one patient on whom to focus or a small number of cases. The pace of homecare is slow enough that people can talk, things can be noticed, and patients can be given the level of care they deserve (rather than the bare minimum they’re used to in these facility-based systems).
For many who entered healthcare professions simply to care for people rather than to treat them, this is a welcomed return to this type of care.
The Flexibility That Actually Exists
Flexibility in scheduling for healthcare providers working in hospitals often looks like mandatory overtime stacked on top of unexpected schedule changes. These workers often end up working every other weekend for year-long stretches at a time. After all, hospitals are open and running 24 hours a day, which means constant staffing needs for these high-stakes and intense areas.
Homecare is different. Patients need care, for sure. But the homecare model leaves space for so many different scheduling options that an institution can’t offer. Some healthcare providers work in homecare with only a few patients and adjust their schedules for them. Others accept shifts that are given to them based on their availability.
But all of this becomes important as healthcare workers age out of the younger years of their life. Having children who need attention, parents who are needing help as they age, and even physical ailments or periods of burnout that impact how we can show up as employees in our jobs can be made easier to navigate.
Homecare allows for this flexibility without denying workers access to highly meaningful healthcare work.
The Conversation Around Compensation
Compensation in homecare is also a different conversation than one that’s been held in other healthcare facilities over the past decades. The market has gotten competitive, especially for healthcare workers who have nursing certificates.
Many professional caregivers find through sites like HHA Jobs Philadelphia and others that there are many places throughout the country offering comparable levels of compensation, if not higher than what they experienced in these facilities. Other factors, such as lowered stress and added flexibility, can even allow them to improve their quality of life.
Much of this conversation also occurs around the simple finances of it all. Homecare offers less spending when it comes to clothing, less time wasted in occasionally expensive commutes to large buildings, and other basic monetary issues that arise while we engage in our office-based working days. Some jobs even offer reimbursement for miles driven while assisting patients. Others even offer bonuses for those who take particularly challenging patients or shifts that receive less attention from other healthcare providers in their markets.
This might not seem important to those who assume that homecare pays significantly less than these other institutions. However, this often surprises these workers.
Continual Patient Care vs. One-and-Done Treatment
One area that’s often ignored in the discussion of the topics covered in this article is the satisfaction that comes from continually caring for a patient and witnessing their improvements rather than just coming at a crucial time for a singular encounter with a patient. In healthcare facilities, a caregiver can only interact with so many patients during the chaos that ensues.
Even caregivers working in nursing homes have such high patient-to-healthcare-provider ratios that many encounters can’t often go beyond a surface level interaction, even if those healthcare workers are working on a continual rather than episodic model of patient care.
In homecare, there is an enormous opportunity for this continual care in addition to clear satisfaction in witnessing the changes that occur in those patients’ lives in addition to health. Healthcare providers see their patients every day or multiple times a day. They get to know their preferences and dislikes. They become familiar with their patients’ “down time” and can return to their hobbies. They form bonds with their families over time.
When a patient improves thanks to the care that’s received from these healthcare providers, they get to witness that process in addition to being part of it.
The Skills You Remember
In particular types of homecare, it’s possible that healthcare professionals are worried they’ll switch to a seemingly indirect form of healthcare delivery and end up wasting their skills instead of using them on a regular basis. Many homecare providers, however, use their instincts as clinicians nearly every day.
Knowing what changes in a patient’s condition require a change in prescribing or knowing that a medication isn’t working is helpful when a healthcare provider is the only healthcare worker present in an environment. Avoiding complications is even more importantly implemented when those practitioners have fewer fellow staff members monitoring those patients every step of the way.
Homecare also increases some of these skills that these institutional workplaces don’t rely upon. Improvising the tools available in the instance of medical situations? Being able to teach family members how to assist when helping to care for a patient? Communicating between levels of care? Implementing lessons in skills can become incredibly complex yet still satisfying.
The Independence of Working in Patients’ Homes
Homecare inherently allows for much more independence than an institution like a hospital or nursing home that’s guided by bureaucratic systems overseeing a multitude of moments within each of these systems.
Healthcare providers delivering homecare services make independent clinical decisions all throughout these healthcare working days. Everything from how best to position a patient to knowing when their patient should reach out to a doctor is done by these practitioners at least once or twice per workday.
For many healthcare providers who’ve worked in their field for decades but who are tired of being micromanaged by supervisors who still don’t respect their expertise, this independence can seem transformational.
What This Change Means for Healthcare
Healthcare providers leaving institutional healthcare settings for homecare jobs says a lot about the future of these types of systems. As more and more patients face aging populations and more working healthcare professionals wish to stay at home while also receiving quality healthcare services, this job market may continue growing at alarming rates.
Healthcare workers notice this trend before anyone else and are positive setting themselves up to create a sustainable yet rewarding career for themselves rather than being trapped in toxic-atmosphere building-level systems.
This also indicates something major regarding what sustainable careers look like for healthcare workers. When these kinds of workers prefer lower-intensity work atmospheres, it does not indicate that they’re weak and needing assistance. It does indicate, however, that they need assistance in continuing to enjoy working in a field for which they’ve put so much effort into their training and education.
For healthcare workers reading this article who are considering making this move yet still feel hesitant about it, the transition isn’t as difficult as they may think it could be. Opportunities are available everywhere.
These workers have already built every skill they’ll need to build their careers in other institutional settings over the decades they’ve practiced professional healthcare. And these practitioners are already reporting incredible changes in their quality of life after making this switch. It’s hard not to listen to these recommendations when searching for a new career.