Your team can’t know what they don’t know. That’s why it’s your job to keep them informed. At a Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE), offering training on risk awareness makes a big difference.
Obviously, this kind of training lowers your likelihood of citations. It also helps you keep your residents safer. And that helps you avoid disputes with those residents and their families. At the same time, risk-focused staff training lowers your likelihood of facing legal action and needing to tap your liability insurance coverage.
Here are a few tips to support effective risk awareness training for your RCFE.
Explain the why
If your team only knows overarching rules but can’t connect them to anything that has meaning for them personally, you’re in trouble. These are the situations that lead to staff thinking that something isn’t their job or responsibility.
Make full comprehension a part of team training. Don’t just say, “The Department of Social Services requires X.” Say, “The Department of Social Services requires X because…” Explain the regulation behind the tasks you need your team to handle. Calling out the cost of penalties and how they would impact your ability to continue running can be motivating. Just as importantly, explain how those regulations help to support resident safety.
Giving your staff the full picture helps to foster buy-in. Then, everyone can align behind the same goal: protecting residents to protect your RCFE and, as a result, everyone’s jobs.
Put an emphasis on areas with the biggest risk
To help your team be more aware of risk so they can proactively mitigate it, focus on the areas where they’re most likely to encounter problems. At an RCFE, that’s typically:
- Medication management: Going back to explaining the why, help your staff understand the huge impact of a wrong or missed dose. Explain resident health ramifications with common medications, along with the potential for legal trouble for your facility. Then, make sure you walk each team member who will be handling medication through your documentation process step by step. Good documentation is the key to training that sticks. When team members know they need to record what they do, they’re more likely to go through every required step.
- Family communication: Role playing difficult family conversations empowers your team members. When they know what they can say to protect themselves and your RCFE, they can move more confidently. And when challenging conversations with family members do arise, they have resources to tap.
- Falls: Minimizing fall risk means being diligent in documenting mobility changes and following care plans, especially around supervision and assistance. Train your team using real-world examples of different residents with different mobility needs. Make sure they know how to report balance and gait changes and how to document the assistance they provide to residents.
Doing your part: Foster communication and psychological safety
In every staff training your RCFE offers, underscore the importance of prompt and thorough reporting. Then, just as importantly, let team members know they won’t be penalized for mistakes — only for failing to tell their superiors about them.
Creating a workspace where people feel safe to report things helps you identify issues early. Missed medication doses get caught right away. Minor falls get captured in your system so you can put more support around the resident.
Make sure your team knows who to go to when they need to report an issue. And make sure they feel safe to do so.
All of this goes a long way toward helping your RCFE reduce its risk. That, in turn, might help you lower your liability insurance premiums. To see how your staff training could impact your coverage costs, contact our team at InsureMyRCFE at (805) 413-5668.
