Introduction
Lifeline Homecare aims to provide personalized service and assistance to preserve autonomy and quality of life. Since 1989, Lifeline Homecare has assisted Kentucky families in managing aging, rehabilitation from accidents or sickness, chronic health issues, and end-of-life scenarios (Lifeline Homecare, 2022). Lifeline Homecare is a privately owned and operated personal services firm that operates under a license issued by the state of Kentucky. Lifeline Homecare must transition from a supply-based home health system focusing on what caregivers do to a client-centered one oriented on what patients need.
The Mission and Vision
The Mission
Lifeline Homecare Kentucky provides detailed information about its operation and services. The organization’s website suggests that it connects elders in Kentucky who need help with daily life activities with friendly, empathetic, and adequately educated carers (Lifeline Homecare, 2022). This strategy serves as the eyes, ears, and hands that help families, referrers, and payors discover the benefits of aging at home, including safety, infection prevention, control, cost efficiency, and enhanced experience, results, and well-being.
The Vision
The organization believes in using technology, evidence-based practices, and education to serve its clients. According to Lifeline Homecare, this approach allows the business to be caregiver-driven, client-focused, informed, dependable, and trustworthy (Lifeline Homecare, 2022). Consequently, it is well recognized across Kentucky as the premier supplier of superior in-home personal care and support services for the elderly. To this end, the organization’s mission and vision show its commitment to delivering quality services to its clientele.
Nature of the Business
Lifeline Homecare offers supportive in-home care to all its customers. This is consistent with the guidelines provided by the American Nurses Association (2021) requiring nurses to help patients preserve their autonomy, decency, and quality of life. This should occur anywhere within or outside the hospital stings including the convenience and security of patients’ homes. This mandate aligns with research acknowledging that nursing procedures should facilitate collaborative decision-making and patient choices, resulting in a tailored therapeutic process that takes into consideration the unique clinical, sociological, and biological aspects of a particular ailment (Håkansson Eklund et al., 2019). Other services include those for veterans and those with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, as well as housekeeping, transportation, errand running, companionship, and respite care (Lifeline Homecare, 2022). Lifeline Homecare navigators are accessible 24/7 in any part of Kentucky State. They assist families in determining how to effectively protect their loved ones’ freedom, respect, resources, and quality of life.
Lifeline Homecare provides services from geographically dispersed locations to ensure that caregivers and customers have access to local resources and contacts with locals. According to Lifeline Homecare (2022, par. 3) “Regional Directors, Assistant Regional Directors, and Schedulers recruit and train caregivers, visit with families and clients, plan and manage services, and perform administrative responsibilities, among other things.” Lifeline Homecare Care Coordinators operate from the comfort of their communities to provide high-quality service and meet the specific demands of their areas, complementing the in-house team’s efforts. Most importantly, the elderly receive Lifeline’s non-clinical in-home assistance.
Challenges to the Provision of Medical Services
Inadequate Infrastructure
One of the services that Lifeline Homecare provides is personal care services for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. There is no denying that the facility cannot match the level of care for dementia provided by conventional medical facilities. It is challenging to meet patients’ critical care needs at residence due to a shortage of supporting equipment, such as life-supporting and assistive durable medical equipment (DME). Since 2013, the number of DME suppliers, such as those that provide home oxygen to 1.5 million Americans, has decreased by 40% as a direct consequence of the open tendering policy of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) (Jacobs et al., 2018). Companies were driven to fight for deals and commit to historically reduced compensation rates due to competitive bidding, which biased bids toward cheap, low-grade equipment.
Solution
For patients to continue living independently at home, pricing methods must incentivize DME manufacturers to enhance service and create high-quality products. Businesses should be rewarded for efficiency and dependability in payment structures. A comprehensive network of care must be accessible to assist patients at home adequately (Berti-Hearn & Elliott, 2019). For instance, Lifeline may coordinate with a network of partners to provide mobile laboratories, mobile diagnostic imaging, and at-home medicine delivery. These resources are required for home-based nursing to satisfy the requirements of patients and provide a more extensive range of services. Lifeline Homecare should invest in this infrastructure’s improvement in collaboration with clinical treatment.
Patient Safety
In the home environment, there are particular threats to patient safety. These encompass the need to balance patient freedom and risk, ecological risks such as infection control, hygiene, and spatial setting, and difficulties with caregiver communications and handovers (Haas et al., 2018). Patient safety is a systematic breakdown rather than a personnel fault. Numerous transformation procedures are necessary to create safe settings. Thus, patients play an essential part in their treatment and should be included in discussions about their safety.
Solution
When providing care in the home, it is crucial to carefully evaluate and reduce hazards. Safety must be considered every time a patient interacts with a healthcare provider. This includes designing the medical instruments and equipment utilized at home, creating communication platforms for home-based health staff, and educating patients, family caregivers, and caregivers (Mitchell et al., 2018). For instance, physicians conduct routine home safety inspections and provide relevant advice at the Lifeline Homecare facility. Systematically, the organization requires home safety metrics that are uniform and standardized, as well as means for healthcare providers to share information and best practices.
SMART Goals
Goal 1
To offer home health care that improves the quality of life for patients by reducing the impact of sickness and disability, increasing patients’ opportunities for self-sufficiency, and fostering long-term wellness.
Goal 2
To offer daily quality, skilled and unskilled services, emphasizing rehabilitative, assistive, and preventive care in the home setting.
Goal 3
Conduct monthly reviews of the safety and health performance of the organization to determine if it is successfully managing risks and whether the management system is fulfilling its objectives.
Possible Obstacles and Opportunities
Provision of Infrastructure and Staff Training
In the wake of the ever-changing nature of healthcare, most health facilities may not have the proper facilities and technical know-how needed to effectively serve diverse patient populations and tackle novel ailments. Indeed, this has been the case in the COVID-19 pandemic which has exposed the disastrous effects of a lack of systematic planning for hospital infrastructure and inappropriate distribution of funding, exacerbated by budget cutbacks to the majority of healthcare systems throughout the world (Blumenthal et al., 2020; Dawson et al., 2021). Additionally, healthcare providers have been understandably worried and stressed out by COVID-19 due to the little data available on the virus’s global spread, prevention, and treatment. According to Islind and Lundh Snis (2017), one method of incorporating new medical technologies and breakthroughs in such situations is to provide thorough and user-focused training. Spending enough time and energy on the training phase is essential.
Often, care providers’ worries are legitimate; therefore, it is helpful to have a candid conversation concerning them right from the start of the relationship. While certain worries could result from resistance to change, it is necessary to work through them since fear can sometimes represent a logical risk judgment. Many healthcare professionals voiced pessimism about new COVID-19 vaccinations, however, these opinions shifted as a result of improved education and participation of caregivers and other health stakeholders (Joshi et al., 2021). Consequently, implementing new nursing resources and systems is an ideal opportunity to implement employee retraining.
Patient Safety
Patients’ treatment is traditionally coordinated via a disorganized system of specialists and nurses, with specific setups differing by country. Care for a person with a chronic ailment is generally divided between several people, each taking on a specific duty for a certain amount of time. Mistakes due to a lack of communication between caregivers and patients are commonplace and likely to rise, especially when dealing with patients with dementia (Banovic et al., 2018). Information systems, team approaches, and patient-centered solutions prevent opportunities for solving this problem, but the task is enormous, and the remedies are challenging to execute.
Action Plan
Goal 1
- Action: All personnel will be trained to provide exceptional customer service.
- Completion date: October 2023
- Individual accountable: Human resource manager
Goal 2
- Action: Determine the skill sets required of new hires and collaborate with other health professionals to facilitate skill development.
- Completion date: April 2023
- Individual accountable: Human resource manager
Goal 3
- Action: Improve nursing quality producers and standards throughout the organization.
- Completion date: Regular quality checks
- Individual accountability: Senior Management/External Auditors
Conclusion
If Lifeline Homecare is going to succeed, it will have to adopt value-based agreements that incentivize health services to bring care back into people’s homes and meet the needs of carers. When innovative new approaches to providing care are desperately needed, it is imperative that the funding and regulatory framework within which healthcare service institutions function be modified to ensure the continued development and expansion of home-based care.
References
American Nurses Association. (2021). Nursing: Scope and standards of practice (4th ed.). American Nurses Association.
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Lifeline Homecare (2022). About Lifeline Homecare – Lifeline Homecare. Lifelinehomecareky.com, Web.
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