Picture this: You booked into a shift at a local healthcare community. The shift start time is rapidly approaching, but something suddenly comes up and you decide you want to cancel that shift. It’s no big deal, right?
Wrong. From the outside looking in, cancelling a shift is a quick and easy process, wiping your schedule clean in just a brief phone call. What you don’t see is the ripple effect it causes behind closed doors. Cancelling not only affects the residents and their loved ones, but also the healthcare community, the community’s full-time staff, your co-workers, and GrapeTree. In addition, it affects YOU. Let’s break it down…
How Cancelling a Shift Affects Residents and their Loved Ones
Resident care is our #1 priority, and we expect it is yours as well. There are many moving parts to how GrapeTree and the healthcare communities are affected by cancellations, but the residents and their loved ones ultimately take the biggest hit. Their loved ones put their trust in you to take care of their mothers, grandfathers, sisters, and friends. Each time you pick up the phone to cancel, you’re not only letting them down, but you’re putting residents at greater risk due to low staff.
Research shows that on average, nearly 200 falls per nursing home are reported each year, and there are many more that go unreported. When residents go without their medication or when they suffer these fall-related injuries, it can ultimately lead to their death. These tragic outcomes are often brought about by the ripple effect of a community going short staffed. At GrapeTree, we take pride in our ability to ensure healthcare communities have the professionals required to prevent a staff shortage from affecting residents’ wellbeing.
How Cancelling a Shift Affects Healthcare Communities and their Staff
Healthcare communities are already short-staffed – that’s why their partnership with GrapeTree is vital. They rely on us to have the staff needed to backfill their open positions and ensure their community is able to provide the full, quality care the residents deserve. When cancelling your shifts, you’re letting down both the community and its residents. Not only does the facility continue to run short-staffed, but it adds extra burnout to their full-time employees, it adds stress to the GrapeTree-client relationship, and many residents go without the care they need.
How Cancelling a Shift Affects GrapeTree
Ensuring you’re able to easily book into the shifts you want is one of our top priorities. To do this, our team invests a lot of time and money behind the scenes to make the process as streamlined as possible. A cancellation hurts the GrapeTree reputation with the healthcare facility, and it eats up the hours of everyone involved.
How Cancelling a Shift Affects YOU
GrapeTree considers a no call, no show or self-cancellation a serious offense. Going back on your commitment to cover a shift not only jeopardizes our contractual agreement with our clients, but it also places resident safety at higher risk. We understand that life happens, and that sometimes a cancellation is out of your control, but we also take pride in holding our healthcare professional to a high standard and expect you to hold yourself accountable as soon as you hit that button to book a shift.
Accountability is a two-way street, so we expect it from our clients as well. To ensure we keep healthcare communities fully staffed, we have items in place to ensure our clients to do their part in keeping their commitments to our healthcare professionals, as we expect our healthcare professionals to keep their commitments to the communities we serve. Communities who commit to their posted shifts see higher fill rates, as it lets our healthcare professionals know that the community is reliable and trustworthy.
Accountability is one of our core values, and as a GrapeTree healthcare professional and/or client, we expect it’s one of yours, too. We are a trusted, reliable staffing firm because of the accountability procedures we have in place, and we thank you for continuing to work together to support our mission of improving healthcare.
Healthcare Professionals → Head to the Workforce Portal to pick up shifts.
Healthcare Communities → Head to Client Access to submit your open needs.
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