KANSAS CITY, Mo. — There are some jobs where days off aren't really an option, even when temperatures get dangerously low.
The Visiting Nurse Association of Kansas Cityserves about 350 patients on its home health side and about 80 patients on the hospice side. It's home health covers 17 counties in both Missouri and Kansas. Hospice covers about 12 counties.
When dangerous weather hits the region, VNA activates its emergency plan.
"We roll directly into starting to triage and stratisfy our patients in terms of their complexity of needs and their complexity of care involved with those needs of the patient," VNA Home Health & Hospice CEO and President, Brad Evans said. "So if I have a nurse that has six patients on their schedule on a Tuesday when we got all the snow, she’s going to, number one look at every one of those patients and determine who absolutely needs to be seen today, who needs care first."
Depending on the patient, VNA will determine whether the patient will need to be seen that day, or the following.
"So she’s going to make a decision on if she can get to that patient, when she can get to that patient , how she can reach that patient and then the other patients will be seen in some order or fashion, either later that day or we’ll move those visits to the following day when the weather conditions might be a little bit better," Evans said. "But there’s very seldom a time when we are able to completely shut down from the weather."
Evans says when it comes to home health, and even hospice patients, they're downstream from the standard level of care.
"Most of our patients in both service lines typically come from hospital settings into our environment. So our work is so critical when there’s good weather but when it comes to the weather being bad it, it affects multiple things," Evans said. "We’re downstream providers but the care we provide is a two way street and it impacts that upstream flow in the healthcare setting."
Evans said this is the first time in his eight years with VNA that they've had to navigate snow and extreme temperatures.
"We activated our emergency plan four times in the last two weeks because we wanted to make sure we were doing right by our patients, but right and safely by our staff," Evan said. "All of our patients have been seen. We haven’t seen an uptick in readmission (patients heading back to the hospital) in our patients because we’ve acted and we’ve acted quickly. We have an incredible clinical management team."
Evans says the emergency plan is activated and staff is prepared fairly early on, much sooner than a potential storm is about to occur.
"We make the decision quickly and we communicate that decision to the entire organization that we are activating that emergency plan and so that’s step one," Evans said. "Step two is the clinical managers communicate with everyone on their team."
VNA has level one, level two and level 3 patients in the rural urban and suburban communities.
"Level one is our most complex," Evan said. "The clinical managers talk to their entire team, nurses and therapists and determine how many level one patients they have for the next couple of days and then make a decision on who needs to be seen and then which patients can be moved to a day later or week, so that's step two."
Step three is safety.
"We communicate to our folks all the necessary precautions that we know they’re going to take, but it’s that paternal and maternal instinct in the leadership team that we communicate," Evans said. "We do not expect them to be the first ones out the door when there is 8 inches of snow. Give the road crews time to clear the streets and make sure they can safely reach those homes for those patients that need our care."
They have about 100 field staff from nurses to therapists, social workers, aides and therapy assistants that cover all their patients.
