Home Health & Hospice Week

Are financial or other incentives the right fit for your agency?

It’s time to stock your toolbox to get the job of staff vaccinations done — at least as much as you can. Consider these tips to get your worker vaccination rates climbing:

1. Get loud about removal of access barriers. If you are in an area where your staff are having trouble gaining access to vaccinations, bring problems to your elected representatives’ attention and try to secure change. That’s what industry members and representatives are trying to do statewide in Florida and Texas (see story, p. 50), but the strategy also works at the local level.

2. Pull out all the stops on education. There is no such thing as too much education surrounding the vaccine, how it works, its side effects, efficacy rates, and so on. Crissy King with Careline Health Group in Jackson, Michigan, cites her hospice’s three-times-a-week calls on COVID and related topics as building trust with workers. “We have done a ton of education,” King emphasizes, who believes the effort contributes to the agency’s 60 percent to 75 percent worker vaccination rate so far.

3. Don’t reinvent the education wheel. Tap available tools from a wide variety of sources to help educate your staff about COVID (see box, p. 54). “Better education and support by employers will be helpful in encouraging workers to get vaccinated if they are hesitant,” advises Rachel Hammon with the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice.

4. Feature experts in your efforts. The Home Care Association of New York State “is encouraging providers to leverage as many trusted sources of expertise as they can in their outreach to workers, especially home care agencies who have staff medical directors or others who can speak to vaccine safety and why vaccination is important,” offers HCA-NYS’ Roger Noyes.

5. Make sure education isn’t only one-way. Give staff a chance to ask questions and voice concerns, King recommends.

“Nurses are pretty smart,” observes Jonathan Willman with Consolidated Home Health in Houston. “They are asking good questions and making informed decisions.”

You may get more free-flowing communication by offering an anonymous way for workers to submit questions, adds Ed Kassab with AT Home Care Staffing in Richmond, Virginia.

6. Tackle concerns head-on. Use your education to address common hesitation triggers, King advises. For example, for workers worried about the unpleasant symptoms that may occur, point out that the symptoms from a COVID case can be much worse and infected persons may even wind up on a ventilator, etc. “Try to explain why the good outweighs the bad,” she suggests.

7. Give props where they are deserved. It’s “important for organizations to create a culture of recognition for staff who are getting vaccinated, in order to generate peer-to-peer validation,” Noyes recommends.

8. Consider incentives. With other provider types offering big financial bonuses and other perks for getting vaccinated, home care providers are also eyeing the strategy. A recent HCA-NYS survey found that 40 percent of responding agencies “plan on incentivizing their staff to get the COVID-19 vaccination by offering PTO coverage, gift cards, banking of PTO for employees, lottery prize drawings, and/or other strategies,” Noyes says. These “concrete incentive measures” aim to ease “the process for workers to obtain the vaccine or [show] appreciation for workers who decide to get vaccinated,” he tells AAPC.