The Oregon Caregiver Fall/Winter 2016

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The Oregon Caregiver Fall/Winter 2016 10
At a Marquis University CNA training, students are taught effective ways to work with residents.
A Marquis caregiver lends a hand to a resident.
Marquis
Company
Marquis operates assisted living
communities and post-acute care facilities
in Oregon, California, and Nevada. Kathy
LeVee, vice president of operations at
Marquis, recognizes the key challenges
facing all of Marquis’ facilities.
“There’s no doubt that staffing is an
issue,” said LeVee. “In my opinion,
staffing is going to become the leading
crisis in our profession,” she said.
LeVee cites that there aren’t enough
well trained health care workers even in
Oregon’s urban areas. “There just aren’t
enough workers in the workforce, and
of those workers, we just can’t get them
trained fast enough,” she said. LeVee said
that while she faces problems with the
shortages of licensed nurses, she also sees
a big need for therapists, administrators,
pharmacists, and just about every
position in the long term care service
sector. “It’s the whole gamut,” she said.
According to LeVee, Marquis has
employed many tactics for training so
that they can expand their recruitment
efforts. “From an entry level perspective,
we offer our own CNA classes. We have
the Marquis University and we teach one
class [of recruits] every six weeks. We
train caregivers in our environment; we
do the clinicals right in our sites, which
makes for a nice easy transition. When
we hire people for our classes, we hire
them with the intention that they are
going to continue to work for Marquis,”
she said.
LeVee also said another resource for
recruiting is partnerships with local
community colleges and other caregiving
institutions and that for dietary staff,
they partner with culinary institutes.
These partnerships and a partnership
with Job Corps helps Marquis fill their
entry level positions she said.
“When it comes to licensed nurses, we
have a lot of collaborations with the
universities. Both for the two-year RN
and the four-year RN,” LeVee said.
“This collaboration includes creating
curriculum, performing clinicals, and
providing facility space to perform the
long-term care portions of the clinical
rotations. We’re trying to get creative
with them about their curriculum and
making sure they’re focused on the long-
term care sector.”
LeVee says she really sees an importance
and an urgency for training the workforce
for the future because of the large number
of baby-boomers that are retiring and
heading towards long-term care.
“If you don’t have staff to support your
clinical structure, you won’t be able to
accept and care for those residents and
patients,” she said.
With facilities in rural and urban
markets, LeVee says there just aren’t
enough CNAs wherever you go. “Rural
areas just don’t have the people and
in the metro areas every employer is
competing for that person,” she said. In
a metro area, she said, “You’ve got one
CNA and probably 10 facilities trying to
hire that caregiver, or more.”
“They can graduate from their class, leave
the facility they’re working at, and then
have a job in an hour,” she said.
In order to retain staff, Marquis faces the
same challenges as everyone else. “You’re
seeing increased wages, the effects of the
minimum wage, market pressure, and
the need to offer more benefits,” she said.
LeVee also noted that they’re seeing higher
acuity, which takes more staff to support.
All of these things add to increased
expenses. “The revenue side just hasn’t
always kept pace in the long term care
market with the current formula,” she
said.
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