It is no surprise to anyone who works in health care that census is always a critical issue for long-term care facilities. This especially is an important focus for many skilled nursing care facilities. As more assisted living facilities are now taking many residents that at one time was the purview of nursing facilities, many nursing ...

The word entrepreneur creates the connotation of a business-minded individual who pioneers change, who wants to work for herself or himself, and who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business enterprise. An intrapreneur is a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable ...

Budgets are done initially as computer-modeled projections based on previous performance. What that means is that the computer looks at what was spent and models a budget for the next cycle based on that amount. Thus, if you spend less, you will get less. It's pretty weird, but it reflects the belief that you do not need as much as was ...

The Bush administration advocated the need to rate nursing homes on a similar ranking system to that found in the hotel and restaurant industry. At first blush this seems an intuitively simple and consumer friendly system. Why not have consumers that are looking to place their loved ones in nursing homes have a simple system of one through ...

The operations budget, while based in part on expenses, is also based on revenue projections.  Clearly we would not knowingly budget to spend more than we expect to earn from a product or service and so we budget accordingly.  In general, we do not expect to have a great deal of money left over from revenues received after deducting all ...

What do you enjoy the most about a meal?  Is it the taste of the food, conversation with others or the ambiance?  What is the meal time experiences like for our residents?  Do they eat off of hospital like trays alone in their rooms or do they get to sit with others and enjoy a variety of their favorite foods?  If you are ...

I thought I would confess one of the strategies I employ in dealing with difficult-to-acquire capital items, something I call ''creative accounting.''  As all of my experience has been in behavioral health operations, it was always been clear to me that providing the best equipment for the mentally ill has never been a priority in most ...

  I recently heard a comment that when the Clintons tried to reform health care, it had an unforseen negative impact on nursing. Hospitals, my source noted, were laying off nurses because they did not think they were going to have enough money to pay them because of the cuts. Many nurses left the profession and others decided against ...

Over the summer I made a major purchase at a home improvement retailer. To make a long story short, the vendor: lost my order data due to a computer power failure, delayed product delivery, ordered the wrong size product, forgot to collect payment from me while I was in the store (which meant I had to make an extra trip to the store), allowed the ...

A recent September 2007 New York Times article entitled, At Many Homes, More Profit and Less Nursing, discussed the issue of profit and ownership, especially by private equity firms. This article especially was quite critical of many companies that reduce important nursing staff to enhance their profits. For those nursing homes, especially those ...