We like to describe Lea Picard as “picture-perfect”. Not only does she dabble in photography as a hobby, she also perfectly represents our guiding values of honoring, empowering, and supporting clients and their families in every possible way. She’s worked as a Client Services Manager at Family & Nursing Care for over two years, playing an important role in the company’s expansion goals: working with clients, professionals, and families in the Howard County region as we expand services to meet the needs of those in the area. Lea is also the Client Services Manager for the Seabury care management group, helping to assist their clients with private duty home care needs.

Lea loves forming meaningful connections with clients, which is why her favorite part of her job is going on home visits to clients. Always ready, willing, and able to lend a helping hand, Lea volunteered her time during COVID-19 in 2020 to assist in preparing and distributing much needed PPE packages to Caregivers.

Next month, Lea will be volunteering her time once again to help someone in the Family & Nursing Care family – she’ll be working as the photographer at a co-worker’s wedding!

With a dedicated staff whose daily work activities revolve around being responsive to the needs of clients and their families, caregivers, and professionals, the Human Resources team at Family & Nursing Care puts a special focus on making sure the staff themselves have opportunities to attend to their own personal wellness.

Over time, HR has introduced programs to meet these needs, like making baskets of healthy fruit available in the office, ordering in a salad bar for lunch once a week, and providing discounts on gym memberships.  As COVID-19 took hold in 2020, some of these initiatives became displaced while more of the staff began to work from home.

With the staff needing to put forth even more effort to attend to the needs of others and attention to personal health and wellness becoming even more important during this time, the HR team deliberated on how to motivate the staff to continue meeting personal wellness goals.  Then they found GivHero.

GivHero is an app that offers an innovative solution to support workplace wellness and social causes. Through the GivHero app, staff can compete in wellness challenges and easily track their progress toward meeting the challenge goals through syncing their smartphone, watch, or other tracking device to the app, or through manual entry.  The reward for meeting the goal is a donation from the company to one of a number of social causes or charities selected by the staff member themselves.  Along the way, staff can check up on co-workers’ progress and offer support to coworkers toward meeting their goals, or even engage in some good-natured competition.

For the initial GivHero challenge, a goal was set for Family & Nursing Care staff to take 5,000 steps a day for one month. Family & Nursing Care donated $1 per participant to the charitable cause of the staff member’s choice for every day that the goal was met.  Over 30 participants stepped their way to donating $564 to charity and enjoyed some friendly encouragement and competition along the way.  Over the course of the month, 5,260,363 collective steps were taken by Family & Nursing Care staff members.  Enough steps to walk from the Silver Spring office all the way to Los Angeles!

As she works to put together the next challenge, HR Manager Gabriela Marr is quite happy with the results GivHero has already provided.  “With an entire staff who innately have that giving spirit, what better way to motivate them to focus on their own health and wellness than by offering them a chance to give back while doing it,” she said.

Our efforts to get Caregivers vaccinated against COVID-19

Each week during our full staff stand-up meeting, we discuss the metrics that are most important to our business. In January 2021, we added a new metric – one that has grabbed everyone’s attention because it is related to the safety and well-being of Caregivers, clients and their loved ones. This metric is a thermometer that tracks how many Caregivers we’ve collected COVID-19 vaccine records from.

When COVID-19 vaccines became available across the country earlier this year, we knew we had our work cut out for us with our goal to get every one of the over 1,300 Caregivers affiliated with Family & Nursing Care vaccinated. We also knew that we simply could not stop short of our goal because the stakes were too high. So, we strategized, planned, organized, strategized even more, implemented our plan and revised our strategy along the way to keep up with the changing landscape of vaccine availability.

How we did it:

We communicated. We emailed and texted about the importance of the COVID-19 vaccination, the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, and the requests from clients and Senior Living Communities to only work with vaccinated Caregivers. We put together a video of interviews with several Caregivers who were early adopters of the vaccine, to convince their peers to get vaccinated as well.  We increased the frequency of our Caregiver communications with most of the topics emphasizing the vital importance of getting vaccinated.

We incentivized. At our Caregiver Appreciation Event in June, we held a special raffle with multiple $250 and $100 gift cards for Caregivers who had submitted a vaccine record.

We reached out. In 2020, we hired a team of full-time employees whose sole responsibilities were dedicated to reaching out to Caregivers to stay on top of their need for regular COVID-19 testing.  We asked this team to add Caregiver vaccine outreach to their list of duties. These team members call Caregivers daily to talk with them individually about getting vaccinated, educate those apprehensive to get vaccinated, help them find places to get the vaccine, and follow up with them to make sure they get both their first and second doses (where applicable). Our Caregiver Coordinating and Caregiver Services departments also spent extensive time talking one-on-one with Caregivers about the importance of getting vaccinated.

With these combined efforts, we’ve made great strides in reaching our goal to get every Caregiver vaccinated. While we haven’t accomplished our goal just yet, the finish line is very much within sight.

With over 1200 Caregivers now vaccinated, our staff recently took some time to reflect on our efforts. “What do you think helped us get this many Caregivers vaccinated?” asked President, Jeff Zukerman. The answers came in rapid succession. “Communication!” “The raffle!” “Personal outreach!” “The video!”. Neal Kursban, our CEO, added, “It’s a combination of all our efforts.  The enormous commitment and investment of time is our moral imperative to keep doing everything we can to keep clients and Caregivers as safe as possible. Thank you to everyone who has played a role in our success here at Family & Nursing Care.”

Natalie Blickman is a born helper. Since she was young, she knew she wanted to dedicate her life to a career taking care of others – a spirit that shines through in everything she does for both Family & Nursing Care clients and her teammates. 

As a Client Services Manager, Natalie always goes above and beyond to make a personal connection with clients, ensuring not only that she’s addressing all of their needs, but also that she’s serving as a consistent, supportive, and accommodating presence for them and their families. She is always on the lookout for new educational opportunities to deepen her expertise in the field and continuously bring new and valuable resources to clients. 

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Natalie has been an exemplary team player, offering her time as a back up to Family & Nursing Care partner home care agencies to ensure that clients were well cared for – a level of dedication that led one client’s daughter to call Natalie “a terrific representative of a business that is so important to our lives during this time.” She also frequently offers to assist the Family & Nursing Care nights and weekends Client Services Management team. 

No matter what she’s doing on any given day, you can rest assured that Natalie is always finding a way to help her clients, co-workers, and community.