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With a dedicated staff whose daily work activities revolve around being responsive to the needs of clients and their families, caregivers, and professionals, the Human Resources team at Family & Nursing Care puts a special focus on making sure the staff themselves have opportunities to attend to their own personal wellness.
Over time, HR has introduced programs to meet these needs, like making baskets of healthy fruit available in the office, ordering in a salad bar for lunch once a week, and providing discounts on gym memberships. As COVID-19 took hold in 2020, some of these initiatives became displaced while more of the staff began to work from home.
With the staff needing to put forth even more effort to attend to the needs of others and attention to personal health and wellness becoming even more important during this time, the HR team deliberated on how to motivate the staff to continue meeting personal wellness goals. Then they found GivHero.
GivHero is an app that offers an innovative solution to support workplace wellness and social causes. Through the GivHero app, staff can compete in wellness challenges and easily track their progress toward meeting the challenge goals through syncing their smartphone, watch, or other tracking device to the app, or through manual entry. The reward for meeting the goal is a donation from the company to one of a number of social causes or charities selected by the staff member themselves. Along the way, staff can check up on co-workers’ progress and offer support to coworkers toward meeting their goals, or even engage in some good-natured competition.
For the initial GivHero challenge, a goal was set for Family & Nursing Care staff to take 5,000 steps a day for one month. Family & Nursing Care donated $1 per participant to the charitable cause of the staff member’s choice for every day that the goal was met. Over 30 participants stepped their way to donating $564 to charity and enjoyed some friendly encouragement and competition along the way. Over the course of the month, 5,260,363 collective steps were taken by Family & Nursing Care staff members. Enough steps to walk from the Silver Spring office all the way to Los Angeles!
As she works to put together the next challenge, HR Manager Gabriela Marr is quite happy with the results GivHero has already provided. “With an entire staff who innately have that giving spirit, what better way to motivate them to focus on their own health and wellness than by offering them a chance to give back while doing it,” she said.
At Family & Nursing Care, our mission of care extends to the community through the Family & Nursing Care Foundation, which offers grants to help lower-income older adults gain access to the home care they need and provides scholarships for students to receive Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) training to care for the aging population.
Our efforts to get Caregivers vaccinated against COVID-19
Elder fraud is a growing problem, and scams targeting seniors are prevalent and costly. The FBI estimates that the millions of older Americans who fall victim to some type of financial fraud each year lose more than $3 billion to fraudsters.
Natalie Blickman is a born helper. Since she was young, she knew she wanted to dedicate her life to a career taking care of others – a spirit that shines through in everything she does for both Family & Nursing Care clients and her teammates.
Every client’s care needs are unique — starting with the amount of time per day or week they receive care. Care needs can range from a few short hours a day to 24/7, and Family & Nursing Care strives to provide access to the most affordable, consistent, and compassionate care for every client.
Keeping our clients and Caregivers safe during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a team effort – and nobody knows that better than Client Services Manager (CSM) Amanda Schwaninger. When the pandemic first spread across the country and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) quickly became sparce, Amanda led the charge to secure and distribute over 600 masks to clients and Caregivers. On top of this, Amanda was a true team player, shifting her schedule and working alternate hours to accommodate client and Caregiver needs.
As families get ready to reconnect under sunny skies, it’s important to make sure older family members are protected from extreme heat. For older adults, warmer temperatures present additional challenges that can be detrimental to their health. Family & Nursing Care Caregivers can be on hand to help prevent and respond quickly to warm-weather health issues that arise – here are some of the things they can do to keep your loved ones safe during the heat of summer:
