Quality Vs. Compliance | How to get the results you want!

Michael Greenlee and Hannah Vale are joined by Shirley Gamble. She is a Division Director at BAYADA Home Health, which offers Skilled Nursing, Home Health, Hospice, Assistive Care, Habilitation, Behavioral Health and more to patients in 24 states. She started her career in the freelancing market as an editor and proofreader. Her journey within home care began with a non-profit offering home care services in a dozen counties within Missouri. She then moved to a larger organization where she was a Director of Branch Operations for a single-site.

Shirley dispels the assumption that compliance equals quality, which is not the only component to true quality. Quality also includes financial performance, client and employee surveys, and communication with clients and employees. 

Shirley gives useful advice on how to assess and improve processes within a home health agency: care, reimbursement, outcomes, and reporting systems. To tackle service-related problems, administrators must first know there is a problem and use reporting systems to filter results. Training is usually the expected course of action for a service-related concern but there are other important ways to make data meaningful. 

Perhaps most important is that activities should be communicated in writing or via a webcast (and that the response should be formatted and look pleasant to the eye!) It is also important to share the numbers to show the volume of responses and to show those whose input wasn't chosen why.

Shirley gives simple steps an agency can use to improve employee engagement and gain feedback to help an agency increase in QUALITY!