Complaints about nursing homes are rampant and general opinion about them is poor. It’s well known that employees aren’t happy at these facilities and turnover is high. Right? Maybe not so much, according to results of a customer and employee satisfaction survey from My InnerView, a division of the National Research Corporation.
My InnerView’s 2010-2011 National Survey of Customer and Employee Satisfaction in Nursing Homes found that 88 percent of nursing homes residents and 87 percent of families of nursing home residents rated their nursing home “good” or “excellent.” Skilled nursing facility (SNF) employees said their SNF is a “good” or “excellent” place to work and 76 percent of them said they’d recommend their place of employment as a “good” or “excellent” place to receive care.
The national customer and employee satisfaction survey includes data from 5,466 skilled nursing facilities in the United States. Sixty-five percent of employees, 41 percent of families and 59 percent of residents responded to the surveys.
The picture painted by My InnerView’s survey results defies the general, negative perception of nursing homes. Cheryl Phillips, MD, senior vice president for advocacy at LeadingAge, an advocacy association for seniors, said she didn’t find the results surprising at all. “People tend to believe very negative things about nursing homes in general but this study said when you ask them about their nursing home, they’re much happier than we expect. That has to do with it’s a relationship with me, whether I’m the employee, or the patient or the family member, I have an experience there. There’s people that I know. It is personal to me. That changes the dynamic of the conversation.”
Given the high employee turnover rate at nursing homes, some of the more interesting findings of the survey came from employee responses. The survey found that amid the high turnover, there is a stable core of certified nursing assistants (CNAs). In 2010, three in four CNAs had worked at their current nursing facility for more than a year; one in three for at least five years; and one in seven for at least 10 years.
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As a group, CNAs say their greatest satisfaction is knowing the work they do makes a difference in the lives of the residents and their families. Their biggest dissatisfaction isn’t low pay or the stress they are under, the report says. It is “an environment that ignores them as persons, does not acknowledge or celebrate their contributions and lends no help to relieve their stress.”
“We talk about how hard the work is, how stressful, how underpaid everyone is, but many of the direct care workers are in it because they really, really care about the seniors that they serve,” said Phillips. “They really feel like even though they may not have a lot of education or a lot of skills that they’re making a difference. So when you have a nursing home and nursing home leadership that in some ways validates that with the direct care workers, like the certified nurses aides, that reflects in job satisfaction.”
Phillips said she hopes nursing homes will take the results of My InnerView’s employee and customer satisfaction survey and use it for continued improvement, to ask questions such as “What does it take to invest in good leadership?” and “What is it that families are looking for in their expressed areas of satisfaction or dissatisfaction?”
“I think we can start to use some of this dialogue to help change the national face of nursing homes,” she said. “In no way does one satisfaction survey across the board say we have no quality issues, there’s nothing we need to work on, because of course we do and of course there are, but I’m very pleased that it helps reframe, at least at a starting point, of how we can have a conversation.”
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.