January 3, 2025
What if you could resolve to keep and engage valuable staff in 2025 and live up to this with just a little help from your friends? You can with PALTgrow: Retain, Develop and Strengthen Your Careforce, a new PALTmed initiative. “We wanted to take many of the great strategies presented throughout the first two years of our More of a Good Thing program and structure them in a way that makes them more easily implementable,” says Erin O’Brien, MA, RN, director of clinical affairs and education at PALTmed.
PALTgrow will engage you and your peers in a small-group community of practice that will provide concrete steps to improve careforce retention while developing the leadership and communication skills of your current team. Using a Workforce Development Plan template and the book “Navigating the Healthcare Workforce Shortage” by Tresha Moreland and Lori Wightman as a guide, this program will help you tailor the plan to fit your facility’s needs, identify evidence-based interventions to address those needs, and provide concrete strategies for implementing your chosen interventions. The initiative involves eight monthly virtual roundtable discussions, starting on January 9, 2025.
PALTgrow will be led by JoAnne Reifsnyder, PhD, MBA, RN, FAAN, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, and Carolyn Kazdan, MHSA, NHA, BCPA, senior director of health care quality improvement at IPRO. Ms. O’Brien says, “We look forward to bringing together people who are committed to improving careforce retention and leading them through practical steps to be successful.” Participants will learn from each other, share successful strategies, and—using a template for a workforce development plan—tailor it to create a workforce development plan that fits their own community’s needs.
“Many facilities don’t have a development plan for their workforce. People are so overwhelmed and don’t have a chance to really stop, reflect, and develop a plan to strengthen and nurture their teams and tomorrow’s leaders,” says Ms. O’Brien. “We can put the ideas out there, but I think in many cases facility leaders are so busy that they need and welcome some ‘hand holding’ and ongoing support to actually take those initial steps to implement these strategies.” PALTgrow also seeks to make this whole process as easy as possible. Not only is participation free (thanks to support from the John H. Hartford Foundation and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation), but the monthly sessions are also only 45 minutes in length.
“The foundation of staff retention and growth lies with facility leadership, so we will emphasize developing leadership skills and a positive culture,” says Ms. O’Brien. “We’ve learned from CNAs and other frontline healthcare providers that a positive culture is a huge component of why people stay because they feel valued and appreciated.”
Everyone who registers for PALTgrow is asked to complete a brief, five-minute self-assessment about some of the strategies they are currently using—or not yet using—around careforce retention. Aggregated data from these assessments will be presented on the first call. “This will enable us to see as a whole where everyone is in terms of developing a workforce plan,” says Ms. O’Brien. She further notes, “We will introduce a discussion board or e-mail list so participants can continue the discussions between the monthly calls. This will enable people to share successes and ask questions.”
Take these three simple steps to start your journey with PALTgrow:
- Secure your spot in the Project Grow Community of Practice (CoP) by registering for the FREE series of eight, 45-minute roundtable sessions with your CoP peers. Sessions will be held on the second Thursday of each month from 4:00-4:45 PM ET beginning on January 9, 2025.
- Complete this 5-minute PALTmed Careforce Retention Mini Self-Assessment to help us understand where you are in creating a workforce development plan. We will aggregate the results and provide summary findings during our first meeting. The completed surveys will provide the baseline data we need to measure your success throughout the eight months of the program.
- Share this link with your administrators, medical directors, and others on your leadership team so they can secure their spots too. We anticipate being able to provide free continuing education credits for administrators who attend the sessions (application pending).
