This episode explores the many challenges facing the pediatric home care field in its journey to advocate and care for medically fragile children. One innovative company that is helping in this fight is Team Select Home Care.
Topics discussed:
- Team Select’s unique approach to pediatric home care
- How COVID-19 has affected care for medically fragile children
- An innovative solution to a huge problem in pediatric home care
Conversation Highlights:
Team Select Home Care provides multiple services, but President and CEO Fred Johnson explains they mostly provide skilled nursing and therapy for medically fragile children.
Family caregiving has become a passion of Johnson’s. Parents of medically fragile children experience higher divorce rates and other issues due to stress from their child’s healthcare, and it has been historically difficult for those families to receive the nursing care they need from Medicaid. Team Select helps these families in a variety of ways through their home care tactics.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this became more challenging. There was a nursing shortage that made parents struggle to get the consistent care their children needed for a fair price. The reimbursement rates that Medicaid pays home health organizations to take care of children at home does not keep up with inflation or competitive nursing wages, and that worsened with the pandemic.
Hospitals are now paying very high wages for travel nurses, sometimes even $200 an hour. However, nurses taking care of medically fragile children are among some of the lowest paid nurses in the industry.
More nurses are leaving home care for facilities to get higher salaries, which leaves children without nurses. Parents are forced to either quit their jobs to care for their child or admit their child into a facility.
To help avoid cases like those, Johnson and Team Select support and conduct an innovative model to help equip parents with the skills they need to care for their children in the event of a nursing shortage.
The model leverages the family members of the medically fragile child. Home healthcare organizations can take parents and train them for free to be certified nursing assistants (CNA), enabling them to fulfill most of their child’s needs. The parents can then be hired as a CNA, conduct the care duties and get paid with proper oversight from registered nurses.
After this episode, listeners will have a new understanding of a population in the home care field that sometimes gets overlooked. They will also walk away much more aware of how severely the COVID-19 pandemic has affected children who receive care at home and how companies like Team Select have been working to resolve these issues.
To learn more about how professionals like Fred Johnson and companies like Team Select are addressing home care problems, listen to this interview with Sara Wilson, CEO of Home Assist Health, Inc., a nonprofit based in Arizona that helps private pay and Medicaid clients pursue independent lifestyles from the comfort of home.
If this episode has been helpful, be sure to leave a five-star review and share the podcast with your friends to help us in the national effort to educate about home healthcare options. You can connect with me, Merrily Orsini, on Twitter: @MerrilyO.
Sponsors
The Help Choose Home podcast series is a collaborative effort by Axxess, the National Association for Home Care and Hospice and corecubed to educate the public about the many benefits of the in-home care industry, which includes non-medical home care, private duty nursing care, medical home health, hospice and other in-home health and wellness services.
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