High carer turnover – a common problem in the domiciliary care industry caused among other reasons by low salaries often because of long unpaid waiting time windows between client visits.
High carer turnover is a common problem in the domiciliary care industry – for one reason or another, carers tend to leave domiciliary care companies or the industry altogether. In a recent survey on Facebook, the main reasons for carer turnover were the following:
Unpaid waiting time between visits
Low pay
Not feeling appreciated at work
In contrast, low carer turnover can have positive effects on your domiciliary care company, for example:
Client satisfaction increases if they have been visited by the same group of carers. Carers that develop a relationship with a client over time can anticipate and solve difficult problems while going the extra mile precisely because they know the client better than anyone. If always visited by the same carer, clients trust your company more and their satisfaction increases overall.
It’s costlier for domiciliary care businesses to hire new carers as opposed to retaining existing carers. It is therefore more efficient to pay higher salaries to existing carers, as the carers are motivated to continue to serve the business longer. Your company may also attract new talents as wages become more competitive.
This is a direct result of the above two points. When carers have a steady relationship with clients while being paid well for it, their satisfaction increases through the roof. This directly translates to low turnover as in an industry riddled with subpar wages and uncertain work-life, carers stick around longer with businesses that care about them.
Nursebuddy’s advanced scheduling tools can help you tackle some of these challenges, allowing you to optimise your scheduling, bring down waiting time and allow your carers to get the most pay out of the hours they work. Starting with better data collection and better scheduling, Nursebuddy is here to help domiciliary companies tackle the problem of high carer turnover while also focusing on the benefits for carers.
One of the most significant reasons for carer turnover is the fact that many of their working days include unpaid waiting time. This time between visits of clients varies and can be up to hours. As most carers are paid by the visit (not by the shift), this means many carers experience hours of unpaid wait time between visits every week. In order to receive pay for a regularly long work-day (e.g. 8 hours), a carer then has to work significantly longer days because of the included unpaid wait time.
A solution to this problem lies in scheduling. Why are carers’ shifts scheduled in a way that such a significant amount of waiting time is included? If scheduled visits would have shorter waiting times, not only would carers be able to receive more pay during the same multi-hour window as before with less visits, they would also be working more efficiently as they would manage to complete more visits during their shifts.
How does Nursebuddy solve the problem?
Carer turnover and effective carer salaries is an area where Nursebuddy’s scheduling tools can help, in a way that no other software on the market can. Unpaid waiting time, one of the most common reasons for carers to leave their jobs, can be minimised with efficient scheduling tools.
Nursebuddy’s scheduling tools will plan your company’s visits automatically with a click of a button, taking into account efficiency (minimising unnecessary waiting time) and client-carer suitability at the same time.
Nursebuddy can also help quick and easy access to data around how much unpaid wait time different carers in your company have. Having a clear idea of which carers usually have the highest amounts of unpaid time in their shifts can help you tackle this issue immediately.
Nursebuddy’s scheduling tools are already available, but tracking unpaid waiting time is in development. Would you like to be notified when both of these features are available? Please leave us your email address below.
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