Staffing and Immigration

Several years ago, I was having dinner with a friend who had at one time worked in the same nursing home I had worked in.  We began talking about staffing and ways to ensure that you had good staff, and ways to hold the staff accountable.  She had recently suggested to the company that she was working for that the way to have consistently good staff was to offer good pay and benefits.  As you can imagine, that wasn’t the solution that the corporate representatives wanted to hear.  However, I agree with her.  If you take care of your staff, you can hold them accountable.  Further, if you take care of your staff, they will often perform better.  I’ve often thought about that conversation when sitting through depositions of overworked and underpaid nursing home staff.

This afternoon I have been looking around at other nursing home blogs, and I stumbled on this tidbit.  The Legal Medicine blog has lots of great posts, but this one in particular caught my eye.  It reminded me of the conversation with my friend . .

It seems that Nursing homes are concerned about immigration reform because it might hurt their staffing.  Think about that for just a minute.  The more immigrants they can hire, the less they have to pay them.  The less immigrants they hire, the more they have to pay.  Does everyone see that this has very little to do with staffing, and everything to do about the bottom line?

Yes, staffing is a problem in nursing homes.  However, often its more related to what the corporation is willing to pay for staff, rather than availability of people to fill staff positions.  And sometimes, you get what you pay for.