Assisted Living Policies & Procedures Explained | Start Now!
Oct 24, 2024
Running an assisted living facility isn't just about caring for people. It's also about having a good system to keep things running smoothly and following the rules. That's where policies and procedures (P&P) come in. Let's explore why these are so important and how they can help your facility.
Check out the video, too:
What Are Policies and Procedures?
Policies and procedures in assisted living are like a rulebook for your facility. They cover everything from how to care for residents to how to prepare food safely. These documents can be pretty long - usually 150 to 200 pages or more! They're your guide to running the facility right.
Why Are P&P Important?
There are two big reasons why you need policies and procedures:
- Following the Rules: The law says you must have these. Your state will tell you what needs to be in them to meet their rules.
- Running Things Better: Clear instructions help your staff know what to do in different situations, making everything run more smoothly.
Keeping Your P&P Up to Date
Rules can change, so your policies and procedures need to change, too. For example, during COVID-19, there were new health rules that facilities had to follow. If you don't keep your P&P updated, you could get in trouble or even lose your license.
Making P&P Easy to Use
It's not enough to just have these documents. Your staff needs to be able to use them. Here are some tips:
- Keep your policies in binders, sorted by topic (like resident care or food services)
- Put them on tablets or computers so staff can search for what they need quickly
- Train your staff on these policies so they understand them
How P&P Help Your Facility Run Better
Good policies and procedures can make your facility work better in many ways:
- They give clear steps for tasks like admitting new residents or hiring staff
- They help avoid mistakes by making sure everyone knows what to do
- They make training new staff easier
- They can help your business be worth more if you ever want to sell it
Wrapping Up
Policies and procedures are more than just paperwork. They're a key tool for running a great assisted living facility. By keeping them up to date, easy to use, and part of your staff training, you set your facility up for success.
If you need help creating a business plan for your assisted living business, download our Business Plan Checklist to ensure you have a solid business plan to help launch your assisted living business.
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Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
not only are policies and procedures a requirement in assisted living but they're also an extremely helpful tool in allowing you to run your business more efficiently in today's video we're going to get in and talk about uh what policies and procedures are in assisted living and why they are so important hi everybody i'm brandon gustafson i own and operate two assisted living facilities and i created this channel to help people just like you learn the ins and outs of investing in assisted living
00:00:25
welcome to assisted living investing [Music] hey welcome back to the channel in our last video we talked about the importance of a setting up processes why it's important for your business to have these processes in place so you can better function as a business owner in today's video we're going to be talking about what are assisted living policies and procedures and why they are important for you as an assisted living facility operator and owner so definition of what policies and procedures are
00:01:04
they are a compilation of all the processes that you intend to follow to help your business to be successful and to comply with all of the governing rules and regulations that you're going to encounter as you get into assisted living your policies and procedures are basically your business handbook is what they are i've seen a lot of different policies and procedures they're pretty lengthy i think one of our facilities we're up to it's 150 200 pages they're very long they hit all the different
00:01:37
federal regulations and all the different state regulations you have to have them in order to operate as a facility but they're very lengthy and have a lot of information in there but if you do it right you can create the system for yourself to help you operate the way that you should be operating so why would you do policies and procedures really there's kind of two big reasons number one is it's a requirement to run your assisted living facility you you have to have it the state will require you to have a
00:02:06
policies and procedures handbook or a policies and procedure manual and that set of policies and procedures are going to be reviewed by the state during your initial application process and i'll talk about how you get licensed i've talked about that in a previous video so go ahead and watch that and the state will often give you a detailed outline of the exact things that you need to have in your policies and procedures they're they're not asking you to reinvent the will they have a lot
00:02:32
of the information that you need they have certain requirements that you need to meet there's often state statutes that you need to follow and you can reference them in your policies and procedures so the state will give that to you so that you know what needs to be in your policies and procedures something that is really important for you to remember though is just because they require something doesn't mean that that's the only thing that you need to have in your policies and procedures you can bring in other
00:02:59
things you can set up your own policies there are just a bare minimum that you need to have to meet state and federal guidelines so that you can have your license and operate your facility the the way that it needs to be operated that's just something that you want to keep in mind you can go and create your own policy around certain things that's totally fine as long as it's underneath the purview of those federal and state regulations you just need to make sure that you are getting those in there
00:03:28
the state is also going to expect you to keep your policies and procedures up to date with the most current rules and regulations so if something comes in like coven you need to update your vaccination policy to match whatever the state or federal guidelines are telling you need to do with vaccination status or masks or whatever that guidance is um you need to make sure that you have a policy and procedure up to date for it because when you have a state survey come in they're going to be looking for
00:03:57
those policies and procedures so it's just something that you want to be aware of as as you're doing things you need to make sure you keep it up to date with rules and regulations make sure you're in the state meetings on mailing this from the state so that you know what the most current rules and regulations are so you can then update your policies and procedures to match that information it's a lot of work up front it's a lot easier to maintain it once you have things and then just being in those
00:04:18
meetings is going to allow you to keep those policies and procedures up to date and get what you need inside of those policies and procedures when you have a state survey um the surveyor is going to come into your facility and they will nearly always ask to see certain policies and procedures during their visit so they're going to come in and they're they're going to just say and you won't know what one they are i want to see your vaccination policy and your policy on hiring people and
00:04:45
your policy on food prep and then you have to go to your policy and procedure book pull out those policies and procedures and hand them over so the surveyor can then look at them so that's the important part of keeping things kind of in a good spot where you can kind of track everything you have it in a way that you can update it and that is very accessible and giving to somebody so that they can then do the updates that they need to do now on top of having your policies and procedures actually
00:05:14
written and in a handbook and accessible you need to also make sure that you are following your policies and procedures you can't just like write something because that's what the state told you you had to write you need to actually do the thing that you have said that you're going to do and the state will look at that when they're doing their surveys to make sure that you are following the policy and the procedure so if you have a policy that says we have a spot for uh like you know a corner in in the
00:05:38
house where the residents can get information on the ombudsman um and some of these other uh detailed information you better have that spot in the house or else you'll get dinged from it from the state surveyor you want to make sure you have that something that we've also found to be really effective and we're working on modernizing this right now is have your policies and procedures in a handbook put them in binders you know have you have a binder for residents you have a binder for food you have a binder first
00:06:04
safety you have a few different binders that have these different policies and procedures in them create digital versions of them as well it's a lot easier to maintain them keep them up to date and then you just print off the page to pull out the old policy and procedure put it in the new one and you also have this digital version we use it on a tablet that our staff can go in and reference if they needed to they could search for it it just makes it a little bit easier to find some of those pieces of
00:06:32
information if they have a question rather than trying to go and find the right binder and everything make it digitally access accessible for your staff in case they need to reference or have a question about a certain policy and procedure that you have the second reason that you would have policies and procedures is it's going to allow you to run your facility your business a little bit more effectively and efficiently so this is just really good practice for you as a business owner regardless of if
00:07:00
you are assisted living working in assisted living or not having policies and procedures and developing these types of plans is going to be a good idea for you as a business owner so that you can just be more effective and efficient with your work and allows your staff to know what um needs to be done this is one of the big pluses of working in a franchise they often well they should have those policies and procedures written out and then you're just kind of following them because they've already built them so you don't
00:07:28
have to put in all the work up front to get it done so if you're joining one of these these locations that does franchising for assisted living they're going to have a lot of the policies and procedures in place already they're going to have a lot of that information which is great for you you don't have to build it up by yourself um it's going to be largely there already for you but you can share your policies and procedures with employees so that they know how to handle certain situations
00:07:55
that's how it really helps you be more effective and efficient we're implementing a process in our training with our new employees so they know where the policies and procedures are and reviewing certain policies and procedures that are really important that they're going to encounter frequently we're putting that into our staff training so that they know um how to interact how to handle those types of situations as as they come up because there are going to be situations that they just
00:08:22
don't know what to do and we're hoping that as we build in this training process with our staff that is going to allow them to know what they need to do to handle a certain situation i mentioned this a little bit earlier in the video but you can implement and create these different policies and procedures that are going to help you understand better processes or create better processes for doing things like hiring people or bringing in a new resident into the house we are creating mapping tools that are
00:08:51
going to allow us to to do that so that our administrator they can go in and they look at the mapping tool and say okay this is what i need to do we ever had to bring in a new administrator the mapping tool is there they can follow the process if we want to expand our portfolio and and get more facilities we have this policy and procedure in place and it's going to allow us to kind of you know build things out and scale a little bit better because all that is in there it really helps us streamline that process
00:09:19
and it's going to do that for you as well so you don't have to try to remember so that you or your administrator or any other staff member they don't have to try to remember how to do something every single time it comes around you know it might be you might go six to 12 months between getting new residents just because you have a good solid resident base and nobody's passed away or needed to go to a nursing home or anything like that and so you don't have to make any changes and then all of
00:09:44
a sudden you've got to bring in three or four new residents but you haven't done it for six to twelve months you're not going to remember how you did things previously and so documenting that process is going to just allow you to remember oh yeah this is what i did this is how i did it this is the process that we go through this is how i get the information on medicaid or how i get the banking information for our residents this is the form that i need to fill out this is the lease it just has all that in there
00:10:08
very simple very simple very easy to follow and you are just kind of building that out so just makes it a lot easier for you down the line another important part about policies and procedures is it's going to help add some value to your business um if you ever get to the point where you want to sell it down the road having good policies and procedures in place you know those really good processes that are there it's really hard to find that having looked for several different opportunities to purchase a facility in
00:10:37
the past just doesn't really exist and so the more that you're able to do that the more value your business is going to have because you could sell those processes those policies and procedures that are up to date to a buyer and it's just going to add value to it because they're not coming in completely blind you could also probably build in something where you're kind of a act as a consultant for the first you know 6-12 months or whatever so that you could also get a cut or you can work something
00:11:06
out negotiate something in the in the pricing structure of the facility as you're purchasing it from them to help them just transition and be successful in the industry which is really what we all want we as much as there's competition and things like that we want everybody to be everybody to be successful because the population we're trying to help we want to help them out and having good policies and procedures and processes in place is what's going to allow us to to do that and so the more that you can
00:11:34
structure these things to have it be more of a kind of a turnkey type of a business the higher people are going to be willing to pay top dollar for it you have a higher functioning business people will pay a higher dollar amount to have that business so it's going to just benefit you in the long run to also have that um then you'll also have that system in place as you try to replicate it to grow your business to scale your business whatever you need to do there you're going to have those things in
00:12:01
place you might have to make little tweaks if you're doing going to a different state or something changes a little bit but for the most part everything's going to be there for you already and this is going to really benefit you by by doing that how do you write policies and procedures so now that you can see kind of that value of the value proposition there of policies and procedures building in those processes the next big question is how do you go in and write all of it up so a really great resource
00:12:31
especially in assisted living is to get a checklist of the certain types of policies and procedures that you're going to need for your facility and oftentimes i mentioned this a little bit earlier that can be provided by the state so they're going to have certain requirements that they need you to meet but those are the different policies and procedures that you need to build so that you have them available they will give you a list of everything that you need to cover uh so that you can obtain your license and this is a
00:12:56
really really solid just good firm resource that's going to allow you to be successful as you're building out that policy and procedure for your facility gives you the base of what you need the bare minimum and then from there you're able to kind of start building things out so the structure of a policies and procedures is kind of two-fold and it's all in the name first you have a policy and the way that it's written and this is kind of the process that you go through as you're writing
00:13:24
out that policy and procedure the first one is you have this policy and you write it out it says something like this it is the policy of this facility that we will hire top-notch talent to join our caregiving family so that's your policy that's you know that's the thing that we do the second part of that is your procedure so in here you go back you can watch some of my previous videos on setting up processes um that i and i've referenced that a little bit earlier in the video um for example on
00:13:51
the process of hiring new staff i went into that pretty improv quite a bit of detail in that video so go ahead and watch that one um so you can get a feel for what that's like but you build out this procedure this is what i do as i'm trying to hire staff and this is you know i built this spreadsheet i'm gonna track how i do the interview process i'm gonna track how i um do all of the uh the background checks and and the vaccination status check and all of those things that i need to do at my
00:14:21
facility i'm going to build in this procedure on how i'm going to do that i'm just going to write it up just put it in writing that's my procedure that's all you have to do you could also create mapping of that and i'll probably do a video on mapping at some point in the future so i'll link that at some point so you can see how how you might create a mapping procedure for how you're gonna you know hire somebody or or whatever it looks like the reason that you write your policies and procedures like
00:14:51
this you have your policy up here you have your procedure down here and so you can find it and reference it quickly and then you can pull it out when a surveyor comes you can pull out that one single policy and procedure rather than trying to find you know pages 35 through 37 of this docu this huge 150 page document is what i need to grab it you can just pull it out it's very specific and then it also allows you to update um individual policies and procedures if you just have one for staffing and
00:15:21
you're changing your procedure and you're changing your procedure on it it's going to allow you to just pull that one out create the update put it in and then you're good to go and then it keeps it clean keeps it looking nice so that's the advantage of kind of creating your policies and procedures in this way each one is kind of its own standalone document and allows you to build it out that way so the more policies and procedures are more kind of specific you can get with those policies and procedures the better
00:15:48
off you're going to be because you can be very specific and targeted and how you want to do it you got to be a little bit careful you don't want to have too many of them because it can get overwhelming to try to remember all of them but you do want to be have very good strong buckets of policies and procedures that you're going to follow in different areas and try to be as comprehensive as you can be when you're building those out because it's just going to allow you to be higher functioning as a facility
00:16:14
and meet the needs of your residents and improve your business as well you also want to make sure that you're taking the time to build good policies and procedures it's it can be extremely stressful it's a lot of work to put that together um but it's really worth it for your business to kind of have those things in place we've talked about that a lot today so just make sure you do that and then the last thing i mentioned this earlier you got to make sure you stick to it you can't just write these up and spend the
00:16:43
time to do it and then put it in a closet and forget about it and just hope that the next time the state surveyor comes out that everything is fine you need to actually live by these different policies and procedures that you're building because that's going to allow you to be successful so that's that's you know the reason why you are building policies and procedures how you kind of do them really good solid overview i hope i hope that was helpful for you make if it was make sure you smash that like button let
00:17:10
the world know that this is a really good video on what policies and procedures are in assisted living because it's a really big part of policies and procedures and gaining the knowledge about policies and procedures is just going to help you be more successful as you're trying to run your business in our next video we're going to get in should you pay for a policies and procedures handbooks we talked a lot about today how you can write them and and do certain things you can actually buy them so i'm going
00:17:39
to get into a little bit of how you can do that should you pay for them and why you might consider that so make sure you go and hop over to that video and let me know what you think i'm going to say this again if you are interested in learning more about investing in assisted living make sure you visit me on assistedlivinginvesting.net i've got some free resources over there and you can also set up a call with me and we can kind of chat through the process of how how you might go about doing your own policies and procedures
00:18:07
for your facility and remember it doesn't take a lot just a little bit just keep making progress step by step by step if you do and you're consistent you're diligent in in consistently doing things i promise you that you will be successful thanks for watching and have a great day [Music] you
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