Pros
- Flexibility as you schedule your own patients. - No pressure to work more and more because you get paid per visit. - Ability to make lots of money if you are willing to work long hours and weekends.. it comes in handy when you need extra money like before a vacation or something... but only when they can assign you patients. You are at their mercy for that... More about this below.
Cons
- Bad compensation and benefits, below average salary. - no mileage reimbursement. - no paid time off or paid holidays. - no benefits if you can’t make 30 visits/week.. even if the caseload is low and it’s not your fault. - no orientation or training whatsoever, they have some videos you can see and in the name of training someone will call you and talk to you for 5 mins about the videos. After that you are basically on your own. Good luck figuring things out. It’s extremely overwhelming if you have never worked in home health before. Also, if you worked in outpatient settings or any other settings, good luck figuring out what and how to do stuff once you ring the bell of your first patient’s door! They can let you shadow a therapist some times but honestly they need a proper orientation programs for new recruits. - many times you end up working on the weekends.. to make up for patient cancellations during the week and meet your visit quota. Also some patients are VIP and you might have to see them on holidays and weekends. - poor work/life balance especially in the beginning. It took 1 year to finally realize that I could not spend my weekends working if I wanted to have a social life. - DOCUMENTATION - this is the worst. You will spend countless unpaid hours doing the paperwork and finishing notes... Evals will take forever. You will spend hours on weekends doing this as well. After 1 year of experience I was able to finish regular/daily notes while working with the patient if I was lucky but you always take home Evals to write. Many patients do not appreciate you working on your tablet while you treat them as well. - WHY I QUIT - the immediate patient intake coordinator or the one who assigns patient is not a clinician. You have to be in their good books at all times in order to keep getting patients. They will stop assigning you patients and scare you by saying the agency (HCP of Texas) has banned you because - you missed a visit/ you missed a VIP client visit/ patient complained about you/ you did not call the patient immediately, etc. This may or may not be true but basically this shows how the company is willing to throw you under the bus when they can afford to so. This especially happens when they suddenly recruit new therapists in the same area or acquire another staffing agency and hence they don’t need you as much as they did before this. When there are holidays or other therapists not available you are magically “unbanned” and get patients again. This affects your visits and of course your paycheck. When you contact the superior management you only get superficial replies saying they will look into it the matter but they probably don’t care as they are always busy hiring new recruits and acquiring new staffing agencies instead. When things like these (banning when not needed because other therapists are available and unbanning when needed) happen again and again and you see that the management could not care less, you definitely start to question working for such a company. An organization that can’t stand up for their own employees is not worth working so hard for. Throwing you under the bus - All the hard work you put in; working on holidays, weekends, driving to really far coverage areas for their VIP clients on emergency basis because no other therapist was available to do so, is forgotten because suddenly they have a big pool of therapists covering the same area and you are not needed as much for now.