By holding onto the values instilled by its founders, this home healthcare agency continues to provide high quality care.

Thirty-one years ago, Mr. and Mrs. Caracci had a dream to bridge the gap in care between the hospital and the home for elderly patients, providing an option for home care rather than being admitted to a nursing home. Sta-home Health Agency now has more than 750 employees who make that dream a reality for thousands of Mississippians every day.

Michael Caracci, Executive Director

From the heart
Sta-home operates 41 locations covering 46 counties in Mississippi. As many healthcare companies struggle to recruit nursing staff, this company has an overabundance. Although the eight-to-five work schedule, with the occasional on-call weekend, could be part of the attraction, Caracci believes the real answer lies in the quality, culture, and level of care the agency provides.

“Home health nurses must exercise independent judgment to formulate sound recommendations to the physician for the patient’s plan of care,” he explained. “Hospital nurses have little or no input into a plan of care, and they function under multiple levels of constant oversight. Home health nursing practice is very different; it takes a special kind of nurse to be a good home health nurse.”

Home healthcare is also a way for nurses to see the direct impact they make on patient lives. In a hospital, said Caracci, nurses can help patients while they’re inhouse, but once the patient goes home, nurses must move onto the next case. Nurses who work at Sta-home, however, are in patient homes, getting to know their routines and impacting a patient’s day-to-day activities.

He recalls a newly diagnosed diabetic patient in earlier days that could not control her diabetic episodes. The nurse continued to teach and visit the patient’s home for a number of days, but nothing changed. Caracci told the nurse to go to the patient’s home and stay from the time the patient woke until she went to sleep. On the second day of that routine, the nurse discovered the patient’s daily ritual of eating a slush puppy with her granddaughter was the source of the problem.

“You have to be a part of patients’ lives to understand what they’re going through,” he said. “We always enter our patients’ homes as though we’re guests; they’ve invited us in, and we act accordingly. We have to educate them on what they can and can’t eat, but for them to trust us, we need to show we truly care.”

Quality control
In 1999 Sta-home became the first freestanding home health agency in Mississippi to become Joint Commission certified. The agency also became the first in the Joint Commission’s history to receive its certification with commendation after only the first inspection. In large part, this comes from the agency’s commitment to quality care and continually improving what Caracci calls patient care paths—the steps by which a nurse helps patients gain some level of control over their health.

Over the years, Sta-home nurses have developed care paths for each type of ailment, from wound care and broken bones to diabetes and COPD. Initially, nurses began with a basic care path and tweaked it based on the patient’s response. Now, in the fields of cardiology and diabetes, nurses are developing more detailed specialty programs. Although this development doesn’t change the agency’s recruiting habits, it has changed the way it educates its staff.

“We are big believers in continuing education,” Caracci said. “For example, we have diabetic educators who train and teach nurses interested in diabetic care. In each of our locations, we have a wide spectrum of nurses trained to handle complex disease processes.”

Sta-home also equips each of its nurses with a pocket PC to log the day’s events and keep nursing administrative teams up to date. “We’ve had point-of-care technology in the home since 1994, and we also have disaster recovery programs in place so we can care for our patients regardless of what Mother Nature brings,” Caracci said. “Sta-home’s strategy is to continually improve our nurses abilities, and our point-of-care technology enables us to incorporate mandatory best practices for disease management into the computer. We think physicians will recognize and appreciate consistently improved patient outcomes.”