Finding 32621 (2022-002)

Community Care agrees with this finding. The youth served by this service are in the protective custody of the DHHS due to findings of abuse or neglect and have been removed via court order from their families. Visits do not occur unless they can be supervised. In an effort to improve employee engagement and retention, Community Care has taken the following steps. 1. To reduce turn over, in March of 2022 Community Care implemented a weekly employee training and development meeting. We were losing many employees in the first month of employment. New Employees must participate for the first 90 days of employment. The new staff attend this weekly meetings to learn about the professional aspects of the Family Visitation Service and how to manage visitations safely. 2. In December of 2021, Community Care began advocating for a higher rate for each hour of billable services. Following these discussions, DHHS was able to provide a couple of amendments to the contract in an effort to increase access to revenue and support hiring. a. The first was allowing for billing more time when a visit was cancelled. Previously Community Care could only bill for one hour of a visit that was cancelled even when the visit was scheduled for three hours. Now, Community Care can bill for the one hour and ? the time scheduled after the first hour. Section II ? Financial Statement Findings ? Planned Corrective Actions (Concluded) b. The change was to use unspent encumbered funds to pay for sign on bonuses. Sign on bonuses for new hires of $1,500.00 dollars were allowable until June 30th 2022. c. And finally, DHHS agreed to a slight increase in rates which allowed Community Care to pay a $2.00 per hour bonus to direct care employees for the billable services they document and Community Care Billed for. This agreement expired September 30th, 2022. 3. In anticipation of the sign-on bonus and the increased rate ending Community Care began advocating for a higher rate in the summer of 2022. We were pleased to hear that at renewal of the contract, Oct.1st 2022, that DHHS would increase the rate to $66.00 per billable service hour. This increase allowed Community Care to increase our starting wage from $16 per hour to $17.25 per hour. To date, this increase appears to be resulting in more applicants. Once we are at full capacity we will have no issues in meeting the contract timeline standards in providing supervised visitations. Additionally, we are currently testing and implementing a new process to track deadlines within our electronic client record system. This system measures the 7 day timeframe from a case assignment we receive from DHHS to the first visit. We are developing over the next 30 days a way to track the 3 days from a case assignment by DHHS to the first time we make contact to set up a visitation schedule. Tracking both of these measurements will be done in our ?Credible? electronic medical record. Using the EMR will allow us to produce regular reports for managers to keep track of each case and timeframes. Responsible Official: David McCluskey, Executive Director Date of Corrective Action: In progress, December 2022