A new hospice nursing recruitment effort has launched in the New England region after being stalled by the pandemic.

The recruitment initiative is the fruit of a collaboration between Visiting Nurse and Hospice for Vermont and New Hampshire (VNH) and the Home Care, Hospice & Palliative Care Alliance of New Hampshire (the Alliance).

The effort began as a small nurse residency program that ran for five years prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. After seeing improved recruitment amid rising demand for home-based care, the organization planned to expand the program, ultimately holding off due to staffing issues, according to VNH CEO and President Johanna Beliveau. Beliveau is also a registered nurse with more than 20 years of health care experience.

“This is our opportunity coming out of the pandemic to really kick start [and] relaunch the program,” Beliveau told Hospice News. “We know that we have to be able to support new graduates into home-based care. It’s a pipeline that we can’t overlook. We need to pursue every possible avenue to address the workforce needs that we have.”

The nonprofit VNH provides home health and hospice and is part of Dartmouth Health, an academic nonprofit health system that serves northern New England. Collaborating with the Alliance allows for coordination and expansion of the recruitment program across the advocacy organization’s nonprofit home health and hospice providers.

The Alliance currently has 24 Medicare-certified providers able to participate in the recruitment program, which is part of the New England Home Health Nurse Residency Project. The project is fueled in part by a $150,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved a bill that would create new funds for the program in Fiscal Year 2025.

The residency project began with a pilot program of four home health and hospice providers that had participated in a previous initiative. The funding is intended to help grow the program’s reach to an estimated 10 organizations during a 24-month time frame.

The nursing recruitment program aims to provide a training and career pathway for newly graduated clinicians to enter the home health and hospice space. Nurses with either an associate degree or bachelor’s degree qualify for the program.

Attracting new clinicians to hospice, home health and palliative care can be challenging, according to Beliveau. Recruiting and retaining enough nurses is particularly difficult when so many do not receive exposure to hospice or home health during their clinical education, she added.

“Hospitals have been a staple setting for newly graduated nurses for many years, it is what they look for most often as they are contemplating where to begin their careers,” Beliveau said. “There has been less of that in the home health, hospice and palliative care spaces. Programs like this are still not universal. This program gives them the opportunity to consider a career in home health or hospice without spending years working in a hospital first. It’s looking at ways to bring in those qualified clinicians.”

Among the goals is to recruit two nurses at each participating organization during each 12-month academic cycle of the program. Currently in development stages, the first cohort of nurses is projected to begin in July 2025.

VNH is among the providers leading the project, which will be overseen by a Nurse Residency Advisory Group of up to five nurses from other participating agencies. A nurse educator from VNH will assist with the development and implementation of the residency program’s curriculum, which includes a virtual preceptor teaching components.

The program is designed to educate nurses on the important clinical and communication skills in home health and hospice and explore the scope of ethical, practical and team collaboration aspects of care delivery. Having a peer-support training model and addressing mental health and self-care are two significant pieces of the recruitment initiative, according to Beliveau.

“The program is specifically tailored to home health and what it means to practice in the home setting safely,” Beliveau said. “What many organizations have found is that someone will start in a home health residency program and be able to transition into hospice. So this program could be a parallel track for clinicians to come directly into hospice after graduating. They need to have a preceptor for that clinician to learn about electronic medical records, managing their own workflows and all those things you need to be present.”