When Caregivers Fail to Show

There are a lot of frustrating things to owning any business, but unique to owning a homecare business is that your employees are scattered throughout your service area. And when your service area is as large and diverse as Los Angeles, that causes more than a fair share of stress.

At Right at Home, we have an automated check-in system. When a caregiver arrives at the home of a client, they call a toll-free number from the clients home (not their cell) and clock in and out remotely. If they're late, I receive a text message and email notifying me of this. It's one of the many things has made Right at Home so respected throughout the industry.

While almost every day some caregiver somewhere is late and occassionally caregivers get their schedules mixed up and don't show up (and on a very rare occassion have chosen to tell us they quit by simply not showing up to a case and we never hear from them again), we work hard on screening our employees and have a relatively few such incidents.

With that said, the most unsettling times are the weekends when the office staff is off. And when you toss in a holiday weekend such as this Easter weekend, you stomach begins to immitate a Shawn Johnson floor routine.

This happend to us today when a caregiver failed to show for her normal Saturday shift with one of our most difficult clients. When we called her, she told that our staffing coordinator had said she had the weekend off. We informed her that it was just Easter Sunday she had off, not the entire weekend but by that time it was too late - she had made plans for the weekend and was unable to fill the shift.

At Right at Home we never leave a case uncovered and after seven (7) unsuccessful calls, our Director of Patient Care Services filled the case herself. And while this didn't particularly please the client (who felt she could just have easily been left to her own devices anyway) the daughter was thankful for our quick action.

It does beg the question, though, do a lot of other business encounter such scheduling issues?