Betsy Wade (bwade@signaturehealthcarellc.com) is the Chief Compliance and Ethics Officer at Signature HealthCARE in Louisville, KY.
When I accepted the position of chief compliance and ethics officer for Signature HealthCARE four years ago, the job came with one condition: that I become a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA).
Like many, my compliance career had grown out of the administrative side of healthcare. I had a Master of Public Health degree focused on health services management, and the only time I had worn scrubs was to accompany a hospital photographer filming B-roll of a live donor nephrectomy in the operating room. But I had no clinical experience.
A year after joining Signature, I started my journey to becoming a CNA. I spent 150 hours in classes, learning, among other things, how to don and doff personal protective equipment, take vitals, transfer patients with hydraulic lifts, provide dental care, change a bed with a patient in it, and give a bed bath. The classwork was followed by hours of labs to put my new skills to use and clinicals.
The work of a CNA is physical and emotional, helping others during their most vulnerable times. After completing the training, I passed the state exam and earned my letters. Since then, I have worked as a CNA in several of our facilities during our annual days of service and, most recently, during COVID-19.
Becoming a CNA began as a requirement of our executive team to serve our residents and facilities, but the experience changed the way I work as a compliance officer.
Our clinical teams spend up to 12 hours a day on their feet, selflessly caring for others’ needs with little time to take a break. Unlike those of us who sit in corporate offices, many of our clinicians don’t work at an assigned computer. Instead, they do their history and physical examinations, enter orders, and write progress notes at shared workstations.
The frontline experience made me think about the mandates we impose on our employees to complete hours of compliance training when they face time and access constraints.
As a result, we changed the way we deliver annual compliance education:
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Breaking it into smaller pieces that don’t have to be completed at once,
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Tailoring the training to job roles,
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Providing tablets to facilities to increase access,
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Offering it through an app so the training can be completed anywhere at any time, and
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Providing resources for staff to ask the compliance team questions.
Being a CNA is the ultimate servant leadership role. Being a CNA not only has taught me to be a better human being, but also to be a better compliance officer.
Please welcome Betsy Wade! Betsy Wade is the author of the “Managing Compliance” column, beginning with this issue of Compliance Today. Thank you, Margaret Hambleton, for the insight you provided on managing compliance through the columns you contributed to Compliance Today.
