by Marcelle Thibeault, Vice-President, Client Care
As a not-for-profit that offers home care, community support services and operates three retirement homes and a hospice, Carefor is unique within the local healthcare landscape.
Carefor’s mission is to meet to our clients’ health needs for high-quality home care and community support services. Previously our motto was, “When there’s a need for care, we’re there”, which speaks to how Carefor developed programs based on filling healthcare gaps in our communities.
One Organization with One Mission
While the programs we created served needs within those regions, it created an organization that operated largely fractured along geographical lines with different programs being offered differently in different regions. By taking the major step of aligning our programs across regions, we are now acting as one organization, making us a stronger and more efficient agency and partner.
Throughout our nearly 128-year history, our not-for-profit status has been a matter of pride as we have known that our entire focus has been on how can best serve the community rather than seeking profit. With the emergence of Ontario Health Teams, the increased competition coming from private home care agencies, and a limited provincial health care budget requiring us to do more with less, we know we must think more like a business – while maintaining the heart of a not-for-profit.
Investing in Client Care
As a learning organization, we’re always asking how we can do things better. Often this question has been asked of the quality of our care. As part of our 2024-27 Strategic Plan, we started asking more questions of Carefor itself and how we can improve our efficiency as well. As part of our Strategic Plan, our Client Care Investment Strategy’s (CCIS) goal is to look at all facets of our programs and services to determine how we can do both things.
Starting with our nursing program, the CCIS explored how we could do things differently to support our nurses’ focus on client care. We focused on our nursing volumes and our visits per day by nurses. Knowing our need to meet mandated volumes of care, we reviewed the opportunities and barriers nurses face in the providing care in community.
Working with all levels of our nursing and client services teams we adopted a nursing model of care focused on continuity of care and codesigned a geographic team approach, assigning teams in pods which reduced the distance nurses had to travel and ensured each region had a compliment of nursing specializations to ensure the needs of clients in the community were being met.
Recently, the team codesigned a Skills Day, a first for Carefor, whereby nurses participated in a variety of educational sessions (skills stations). These were led by their subject matter expert peers and provided our nurses with the opportunity to practice, upskill and achieve their yearly recertification for specialized interventions.
We are using the same LEAN Leadership Methodology that we used for our nursing program for our Personal Support Services. Now that we have a new Client Management System, Alayacare, this is proving to be a perfect time to look at optimizing our orientation and professional development model to best support new hires. We are also diving into the scheduling, payroll and visit verification processes with the goal of maximizing retention of part-time and casual PSWs. This in turn will reduce rejected visits and the payroll workload burden on clinical managers, achieving greater volumes and setting us up for future growth.
A word to describe our mindset is investment. We’re investing in our staff through training and technology like Alayacare, the implementation of best practice guidelines, as well as modernizing our physical spaces to create not only a beautiful space to live, but also one that aligns with our philosophy of care.
Connecting Philosophy with Action
Carefor Richmond Care Home is a perfect example of this. We have always believed this retirement home for women living with dementia in south west Ottawa is a hidden gem that offers exceptional dementia care in an intimate homelike environment. By adopting aspects of the Butterfly Model of care, an emotion-based approach to dementia care and by implementing an evidence-based best practice guideline for dementia care (developed by the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario – RNAO) we are improving the quality of care for our clients.
To support this, we are renovating the building to modernize it as well as make it a space that supports our residents’ specific needs. In the end this will make Richmond Care Home a home where excellence of care predominates, and where physical improvements will make the home more appealing in a very competitive space.
Some might say that thinking and operating more like a business pulls agencies like Carefor away from their values of providing exceptional care to all. What we believe is that it will help us provide the best care possible. It helps us explore new ways of working together across programs, bring in capital to help us innovate and support our staff with more training and better equipment. The result is cyclical and therefor sustainable.
Connecting the Head with the Heart
Operating as a not-for-profit in heart is admirable but operating as one without a focus on efficient and effective practice over time is a drain to an organization keeping it mired in ideals rather than best practice.
Our Client Care Investment Strategy is not top down. It is a collaboration with staff, clients and caregivers, pulling from their experiences to help us create the best and most sustainable home and community care agency that we can be.
The Provincial Government has made it clear over the past few years that that collaboration between healthcare providers is the way forward. By calling on the development of Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) which remove government agencies such as the former Local Health Integrated Networks from the centre of care, healthcare partners are working more directly with one another creating programs that put the client at the centre.
Carefor’s not-for-profit status has helped make Carefor a desirable partner in the five OHTs of which we are a part. It is why many of our staff have chosen to join us and have stayed with us for years. However, we see our new Strategic Plan as unifying Carefor along a purpose in a whole new way – one that best sets us on a path for another century.
Despite being nearly 128 years old, in many ways we feel like a new agency – one inspired to take on new challenges with new ideas.