Hi, folks. Steve “The Hurricane” here. And for today’s episode of “A Drink with ‘The Hurricane'”, we are gonna talk about getting to know your Director of Nursing at your referral sources. So raise your glass and let’s toast to your success. Cheers. 

This is “A Drink with ‘The Hurricane'”, the talk show discussing all things growing your home care business. This video is sponsored by Home Care Evolution, where we help home care agencies adapt to changing circumstances, transform their business, so that they can thrive for years to come. 

So a couple of weeks ago, you heard me talk about the most important key contact at a referral source is your administrator. And that is the truth. But if there was a 1A priority to get to know at your referral sources, it is definitely the Director of Nursing. As a matter of fact, I’ll go as far as I’ve had a couple of administrators who knew me and didn’t really like me, but they allowed me to get referrals because the Director of Nursing in their building absolutely loved and cherished me, right. So your Director of Nursing is an amazing professional. They are responsible for all things medical for the patients that entrust them with their care. 

So at a skilled nursing facility, a rehab, an LTACH, a hospital, an assisted living community, this Director of Nursing is responsible for the medical wellbeing of all of their patients, all of their residents. When that person recognizes that someone needs help and they make a recommendation to you, your company, that’s who the family is going to go with 9 times out of 10. So it is important that we have a working relationship with our Directors of Nursing. Now, here are three things that we can do. Number one is let the statistics do the work for you, right. Nothing says we are the best agency in the area like having accurate statistics tracking our readmission data. This is something that I talk about often that a lot of agencies do not do. As a matter of fact, from the most recent Home Care Pulse report, studies showed that one in five agencies are actually tracking their readmission rate. One in five. That means 80% are not tracking it. So if you are tracking your readmissions, you have a significant advantage over all of your competitors. And you can use that to your advantage. Home Care Pulse also discovered that the majority of people who are tracking their readmissions have a 3% readmission rate. If yours is around 3% and you talk to a Director of Nursing and say, yeah, for every 100 patients we take care of, only 3 or only 4 end up getting readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of a discharge. That is hugely impressive. Your Director of Nursing will say how did you calculate that? How many people went into this data? Oh, you had 150 admissions last year? And only 6 people got readmitted? Wow. How can I work with you? So the first tip is let your stats do the heavy lifting for you. Have accurate statistics on your readmission rate and leverage that to get to know your Director of Nursing. 

The second thing you can do, and this is a cool one, all right. I wrote this presentation way back in 2013, called “All Things Assisted Living.” And it talked about how to get to know your Director of Nursing very well. When you’re working in an assisted living, a CCRC, an independent living community, and you have that Director of Nursing who’s the medical head, sit down with her and go to the point of creating a House Rules Document. What’s a House Rules Document? It’s basically an addendum, or an appendix, that you’re gonna add to your employee manual for all caregivers that will work in this community. Things like, what are the break policy? When the client is in the community, who is the ultimate party responsible first? And who is the secondary party? In some instances, the home care agency is the primary. And then the assisted living is the secondary. In other places, the Director of Nursing says, this is my resident. We are responsible for their wellbeing first and foremost. And you, secondary. Good to know. You need to understand that. How about dress code? What a caregiver should wear in the community. How about emergency procedures? If something were to happen to this patient, what is the reporting processes? So that this way the caregiver is aware. Again, break time. Where should they take their breaks? How do breaks get managed? Change in shifts where the new caregiver comes in and somebody’s letting go, or somebody’s leaving at the end of the day. And so much more. By you taking the time and sitting down with your Director of Nursing and creating these House Rules before she ever refers you, that’s gonna make her 10 times more likely to trust you, which will lead her to be more likely to refer you because you went the extra mile that most companies don’t go. Meaning you’re gonna get the business that most companies can’t gain. 

The third and final thing that you do with this, and this is pretty self-explanatory, because once you start getting referrals come back in, follow up, improve those outcomes. If you’re tracking your readmissions, let the resident or the Director of Nursing know that this patient that was sent to you didn’t get readmitted. Go over the outcomes. Every so often have an outcomes meeting to go over all of the patients that were referred to you in a specific period of time to let the Director of Nursing know, hey, it was a good idea to refer me to these patients. Look at the good job I’ve taken care of them. How can we work closer over the next three months? Over the next six months? I have countless clients. So many clients. You see all these pictures right now of people, every single one of them is having these kind of outcomes meetings with their Directors of Nursing, which is leading them to get even more referrals than they got prior to. This is how you form it. I want you to write this down folks and remember it. It’s an interdisciplinary team approach to providing care. You, along with this Director of Nursing, are two parties of this interdisciplinary team. By her referring you and you fulfilling what you said you would when she makes the referrals and then having meetings regularly to go over those outcomes, that’s the ultimate way of working together for the benefit of patients. 

So there you have it, folks. Three tips on how to improve your relationship with your Director of Nursing and increase your referrals. If you like this tip, imagine what it would be like spending three days with me and my staff at the Home Care Evolution Conference. It is going to completely blow you away and blow out the water anything that you have ever been to in the home care industry. So I highly recommend you do the right thing. Click the link below and register for the Home Care Evolution Conference, where you know I’m gonna give you everything you need to blow away the competition. 

I’m Steve “The Hurricane”. And I spent three days teaching all these people how to, “Blow away the competition!”