Human Skills Still Matter Most in Caregiving
Finding, hiring, and retaining the right talent in long-term care is more than a recruiting challenge. It’s an imperative for everyone involved in delivering care and running the organization. Applying evidence-based human skills can be the key to care team success.
The pain of staffing challenges in long-term care is lingering and acute. Difficulty finding quality staff and filling critical roles to serve patients and clients has contributed to high turnover and staff burnout across the industry for years. Even worse, these challenges can lead to diminished client experiences and lower quality scores. This creates additional risk, consumes revenue, and ultimately cripples growth.
Patient outcomes, staff well-being, and business growth all depend heavily on getting staffing right. This includes both technical and human skills to deliver care and contribute meaningfully to team well-being and organizational goals.
Technical Skills vs. Human Skills in Healthcare
Technical skills (hard skills) are teachable abilities or knowledge sets that are domain-specific and can be gained through formal education, training programs, controlled simulations, and on-the-job experiences. In long-term care, they are often known as clinical skills. Clinical skills are usually acquired and validated through education, licensure, and certification.
Common examples of clinical skills in long-term care include taking vital signs, administering medications, and performing or assisting with procedures such as basic tests or removing staples. They are at the core of patient care and are often the primary focus when hiring staff.
Human skills (soft skills) are interpersonal attributes and individual characteristics that influence how effectively people interact with others and manage their work. Human skills apply across jobs and professional domains. In long-term care human skills make the difference between people who meet the bare minimum qualifications of a job and those who positively impact patient experience, clinical outcomes, and organizational culture.
Important human skills in caregiving include concern for others, professionalism, attention to detail, teamwork, and dependability. Peer-reviewed research shows that these human skills not only lead to improved patient and quality outcomes.ⁱ They also lead to improved organizational outcomes such as reduced turnover and fewer workers’ compensation claims.²
Not a Personality Test: An Evidence-Based Performance Solution
A common misconception is that only technical skills are objective and measurable. Human skills are often seen as biased and subjective, and difficult to measure. The right science and a disciplined approach to applying them, however, can produce accessible, reliable, and valid assessments of human skills to apply fairly in all domains, including long-term care.
Scientific approaches to human skills bring a systems perspective to these efforts by profiling jobs, workforces, and performance using statistically sound job analyses, cognitive assessments, and performance measurement tools. These are then benchmarked to national and global industry data and norms for success, safety, and other outcomes. The most common applications of this scientific approach are pre-hire and succession planning evaluations, career pathing, leadership development, and cultural transformation.
So rather than a wonky “personality test” based on the latest trends, pop psychology, or questionable data, scientifically sound human skills methods provide transparent, scalable, and legally defensible strategies and tools. Long-term care teams can use these tools to recruit, select, develop, engage, and grow a healthy workforce through evidence-based research and practices, the gold standard across academia and healthcare.
Most Solutions Analyze Hard Skills and Natural Language, Not Scientific Evidence
It’s no secret that data-driven hiring is here to stay, especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). Applicant tracking systems and data-driven hiring practices, including those incorporating AI, can certainly help to mitigate the chaos around hiring qualified staff and streamline processes. They can also help source the most likely pool of qualified applicants, deliver automated outreach at scale, and process applications more efficiently. This comes mostly from process data and text from a resume, profile, or interview transcript .
But resume matches, knockout questions, and machine analyses of profiles and transcripts only scratch the surface of what makes the best staffing decisions in long-term care. Most do not go through the rigor required for scientific validation and legal defensibility.. To build highly productive, resilient, and lasting teams, long-term care organizations need to go beyond clinical skills and natural language processing into evidence-based human skills analysis.
Educating Yourself is Easier than it Seems. Now is the time.
Evidence-based human skills are simple and powerful to understand with the right tools and partners. With all the hype and overstatement that can pervade the people, work, and technology industry, it’s critical that HR, clinical, and business leaders know the difference between overstated marketing fluff with numbers and evidence-based scientific rigor. Only the most trusted, reliable, and human-centric providers of human skills solutions will take the time to make sure you understand human skills science and its applications to build the most reliable, healthy, safe, and productive workforce for your long-term care organization.
Contact us at info@pointleader.us to learn more.
- Sharkiya, S.H. (2023) Quality communication can improve patient-centred health outcomes among older patients: a rapid review. BMC Health Services Research 23, 886.
- Jurij, R., Ismail, I. R., Alavi, K., & Alavi, R. (2023). Eldercare’s Turnover Intention and Human Resource Approach: A Systematic Review. International journal of environmental research and public health, 20(5), 3932.
