Advancing Excellence Revises Goals
Posted by Patti on May 27th, 2009 / 
Print This Post
Advancing Excellence has announced updates to to their GOALS and several of these give voice to the direct care workforce. AE is now in it’s second year of operation.
Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes is a coalition-based campaign concerned with how we care for the elderly, chronically ill and disabled, as well as those recuperating in a nursing home environment.
There are over 7300 nursing homes participating on a voluntary basis.
Originally the group listed 8 goals member nursing homes should work on. Those goals are located HERE.
Newly revised and updated, three are of interest to CNA’s- this is a PDF file.
GOAL 6 — STAFF SATISFACTION
NEW
Participants in this goal will have to assess staff satisfaction at least annually and upon separation; plus incorporate results into quality improvement efforts. AE has not yet decided on a target objective for this goal but it will probably be twofold: A) Increasing the number of staff surveyed and B) Raising satisfaction scores by a yet undetermined amount.GOAL 7 — STAFF TURNOVER
REVISED
AE will ask nursing homes to reduce current levels of staff turnover for each of the following categories of employees: RN, LPN, CNA, DON, and NHA. Turnover will be measured separately for each of those categories. Participants will have to regularly measure and report staff turnover and develop plans to reduce the rate of turnover for each of the staff categories.GOAL 8 — CONSISTENT ASSIGNMENT
REVISED
AE will increase its efforts to encourage and help nursing homes to adopt “consistent assignment” of front line staff – that is 85% of long stay residents in a nursing home have a maximum of seven (7) CNA caregivers each month AND 85% of short stay residents have a maximum of seven (7) CNA caregivers over two (2) weeks. Participants will be asked to set targets to increase the number of residents being served by a consistent assignment model by a yet undetermined amount.
In another post we will examine, more closely, what some of the AE member nursing homes are doing to promote the goals.
May 29th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Until the industry does something about “advancing” the pay scale for CNA’S all this other stuff is just talk. Low pay equals attracting less educated workers.
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
These are great goals and ones that should definitely be targeted for success. It should be noted that goal number 7 of reducing staff turnover directly correlates to goals number 6 of staff satisfaction and goal number 8 of consistent assignment. If the assignments are consistent, the satisfaction will go up and the turnover will come down. Of course, to increase staff satisfaction and thereby reduce even more turnover, there is also the issue of making sure that CNA’s are always treated like a valuable members of the team. That is best done by management creating the appropriate facility attitude and adjusting compensation to fair and equitable levels.