“Day of Caring” Highlights Long-Term Care Staff

REPOSTED FROM WVIA.COM by Sarah Scinto - click here to listen.

Members of the Pennsylvania Health Care Association and local lawmakers served lunch to staff at a Wilkes-Barre senior care facility, hoping to highlight the challenges caregivers face and nationwide shortages of healthcare staff.

“We’ve remained resilient with sustaining care,” said Jim Cooney, Vice President of Skilled Nursing facilities for Allied Services. “But I continue to see a growing need for access to resident care that can only be met if we have more staff.”

PHCA hosted a Day of Caring event on Thursday at Allied Services’ Meade Street senior-care campus in Wilkes-Barre to discuss staffing concerns, join residents for a virtual reality activity and serve lunch to the staff.

“Without the staff we have present here today, we would have an even more difficult time meeting that demand for care,” Conney said.

Judy Oprisko, Vice President of Human Resources, says Allied Services has experienced turnover at all of its facilities, and they hope competitive wages and benefits like an employee assistance program will recruit and keep staff.

“There's a big turnover because it’s a hard job,” she said. “Some people, you know, get into it and it takes a lot emotionally out of them…we are always looking to recruit and retrain employees.”

As a system, Allied Services has more than 3,500 workers caring for nearly 600 residents throughout northeast Pennsylvania, according to the PHCA.

Administrators at the event lauded state legislators, particularly state representatives Eddie Day Pashinski and John Yudichak who were in attendance, for passing a “long overdue” Medicaid reimbursement rate increase for nursing home providers in the 2022-23 state budget.