Right at Home of the South Hills Achieves Success by Investing in Caregiver Performance and Satisfaction

Updated on August 7, 2016

Right at Home of the South Hills, based in McMurray, Pa., has expanded its geographic reach to provide service to all of the South Hills region and Washington County. The company has experienced rapid growth while building a reputation for consistency, reliability and quality of service.

“Our model is very simple,” explained Doug Ashe, the president and owner of Right at Home of the South Hills. “Client satisfaction is almost entirely built on the level of trust and confidence that each client has in the caregivers chosen to serve them. Our job is to select caregivers who are highly capable and reliable, but who also are able and willing to function in our ‘Serve First’ model. That model states that the definition of success in each of our client-caregiver relationships is defined by the client. Each engagement is as unique as the people we serve. With that in mind, we work hard to help our clients articulate their goals and needs so we can then turn that discussion into very specific deliverables in the care plan. We then combine a clear definition of success and a level of support to caregivers that is unequaled in their experience, to empower them to meet clearly understood client needs and exceed clearly understood client goals.”

The company has invested heavily in a clinical staff – including registered nurses and a physician assistant – who manage all of the care assessments and care planning for the client, as well as the supervision of the caregivers. They also manage the caregiver assimilation process that provides a clinical escort to all caregivers meeting a new client on their first day of service. That meeting reduces anxiety for both the client and the caregiver while also reinforcing the specialized and personalized care plan that will be provided to the client.

Therese Krzemien (RN, MSHS) is the Vice President of Client Care for the company, bringing decades of practical nursing and geriatric care management experience to the role. 

“Caregivers are by nature generous and caring people, otherwise they would have chosen a different path in life,” Krzemien said. “We see it as our responsibility to select a caregiver for each case based on three criteria. The first is capability – are their skills sets and experience a match for the demands of the case? The second is availability – does their schedule and preferred hours line up with the hours of service? The third, and once we cross the capability threshold, the most important, is compatibility – does their personality and interests match with the clients?”

Right at Home of the South Hills believes that by managing those three elements during the selection process, they increase the odds of success for the client-caregiver pairing because they have a caregiver who they know to be capable of meeting the demands of the case, whose working hours best suit his or her schedule, and who has a personality that matches well with client preferences.

Right at Home’s commitment to caregiver support as a key ingredient to client satisfaction is not just a theory. Seventy-four percent of the business they generate is referred to them by satisfied, existing clients or referral sources like hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and geriatric care homes. Their caregiver satisfaction ratings, as provided by a third-party source that solicits anonymous caregiver feedback in surveys managed for hundreds of in-home care companies nationwide, are 9.85 on a scale of 10, which compares very favorably to an industry average of 6.7.

“Creating a custom experience and positive outcome for clients is our ultimate goal,” Ashe said. “We firmly believe that the best way to reach that goal is through and with the individual caregiver. The better choices we make during the hiring process, the more support we are able to provide before and during care assignments. This increases our ability to align social styles and interests of the caregiver with the client, ultimately determining our success for each case.” 

For more information on Right at Home, people are encouraged to visit http://www.rightathome.net/south-hills-washington-county/our-services/ or to call Ashe’s office at (724) 350-8800.

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