Laura Templeton in July was named senior vice president and chief clinical operations officer for Compassus, one of the nation’s largest hospice providers. In the midst of a worsening industry-wide staffing shortage, Templeton is charged with retaining nurse leaders and preparing the pipeline of talent to fill those roles in the future.
Templeton began her nursing career in the acute care setting, following in her mother’s and sister’s footsteps. After repeated phone calls from a fellow nurse and friend urging her to come work in hospice, she began to look into the end-of-life care field nine years ago, taking a job as a managing clinical director. She soon began to rise through the ranks.
Hospice News sat down with Templeton to discuss the recruitment and retention pressures in the hospice space and how Compassus is navigating through the crisis.
How has Compassus fared during the past two years, as far as the labor pressures in the industry are concerned?
The pressures have grown over the past two years. It’s not new to us or the industry as a whole, but there’s no doubt that the pandemic helps make that go a little bit faster. There’s no doubt that our industry has high turnover and high burnout. But like all health care industries, we’ve really focused on retaining our workforce and recruiting talent for our open positions.
As you said, the workforce shortage began before the pandemic. What are some of the other contributing factors that existed prior to the outbreak?
As a whole, the industry is working really hard to be creative. We’re seeing through new incentives, new schedules, wages, remote working, which is prompting people to change jobs. We also saw some of our tenured or seasoned nurses take an earlier retirement around the pandemic, which is only added to the compression that’s currently existing in the industry.
Can you say more about the new incentives that you that you implemented?
I am not going to speak specifically about Compassus, but in health care as a whole we’re seeing large signup bonuses. We’re seeing some competitors in health care offer higher wages and remote working. That has caused a little bit of what they’re calling the great resignation. We’re seeing that causing some of the shifts in employment.
Where do you see the greatest need for new staff as in terms of clinical disciplines or occupations?
We provide home health, hospice, palliative care and infusion services. Specifically home health [staff] has been one of our greatest needs. We’ve seen a shift with the pandemic that people are going home earlier. There’s a greater need for home health.We have a higher demand for home health nurses currently. We also focus on our directors of clinical services.
Our directors are in the local programs, and they oversee our interdisciplinary teams, so it could be nurses, chaplains or social workers, volunteer coordinators. They see other disciplines as well. Our directors of clinical services have a super important role for our organization. They help us unite our teams towards our vision and our values and quality of service. They help us lead.
We provide individualized care plans for our patients. We’re pretty proud of our care delivery model that we have, and our directors of clinical services help ensure that our patients are receiving exceptional care through our care delivery model.
Lastly, I would say there’s to really be creative about how we engage more people into thinking about becoming a nurse. Nurses are so important to serve patients, and so looking at high schools, colleges and others to inspire people to become nurses, because it’s a very rewarding, impactful career.
How would you characterize the type of candidates you most want to hire?
First and foremost: caring, compassionate people who love to care for others. When we talk about directors of clinical services, that has the greatest amount of impact for our patients and families in the communities that we serve. We want those compassionate, caring leaders. I want them to have a patient-focused philosophy. I love leaders that are creative and can identify opportunities and do things differently when needed. I think another trait for me would be resiliency.
When somebody is true to your mission, vision and values, you can really see them help drive better patient outcomes.
What can you tell me about the ways Compassus has been navigating these issues and the strategies you’re using to bolster recruitment and retention?
I would talk about three different areas of how we’re navigating this. The role of the director of clinical services has such an impact on our organization. So what we’re doing currently is recreating efficiencies through technology to make their jobs easier. We’re also improving satisfaction among our colleagues through reward and recognition. We’re also engaging colleagues in different ways. We’ve got several projects going on right now. They’re the ones that can help us come up with the ideas and identify some of the opportunities.
Secondly, we have started a brand new promise for Compassus, and it’s Care For Who I Am. It’s our promise to our patients and our colleagues. It really helps us focus on our colleagues and who they are. It helps us focus on the patient and who they really are.
Let’s say that a patient has cancer. I want to know if that patient was a writer, for example. I want to know that that patient enjoyed trips and traveling, and really focus on the patient and what’s most important to that patient and what their greatest concern is. Compassus has really done a great job with Care For Who I Am, from a colleague perspective. It gets into the fabric of what we do and carries that out to our patients.
Lastly, our care delivery model is really important. We talked about individualized care for our patients and doing what’s most important for them. We have a proprietary care delivery model that’s evidence-based. It’s based on systems and processes that help us achieve better outcomes. For our patients. It’s focused on comfort, safety, quality of life, and our patients’ greatest concern. Let’s say a patient’s greatest concern is making it through the holidays, or being able to get up and go outside every day. That’s what we really focus on to make sure that we have that for our patients. The directors are the ones that are responsible for helping us make this come to life.
Are you able to share anything about the type of results that you’ve seen from those actions?
We’ve seen some early signs of improvement, specifically in retention. We’re seeing some nice trends in our quality and service outcomes, especially with implementation of our care delivery model. We’ve started some enhanced onboarding and training for our directors and our nurses, and we’re hearing great feedback from that.
So there are some early signs of nice outcomes for us, and we’re super excited about 2022. We’ve got a lot of momentum going into the new year. At the end of the day, we couldn’t do it without our colleagues. They’re the ones that helped make this all happen. With their feedback and their involvement and engagement, it really helps us move forward as an organization.
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