More than half of home care agencies lack defined career paths and educational resources to support the advancement of their staff.

At the same time, only half of organizations have an established professional development strategy, according to a new survey from Axxess and Home Health Care News.

The survey involved 135 professionals who work for organizations that provide home-based care. The survey aimed to glean insight into how home-based care organizations navigate training and professional development.

The results showed that only about half of respondents had specific career paths for their employees, a concerning trend considering recruitment and retention issues in the industry.

The survey results also showed that home-based care agencies are relying heavily on their online presence to drive recruiting.

The majority of survey participants – 60% – reported that online job sites are the most used digital tool within their organizations. Online advertisement, social media and company websites were listed as the top three opportunities to make a first impression on job applicants.

“Among the many benefits of in-home care is the personal and ongoing relationship that can be created between the caregiver and the patient or client to improve outcomes,” Axxess Founder and CEO John Olajide said in a statement. “It’s critical that our industry continues to take advantage of technology to help address professional development and staffing issues.”

For those agencies that reported not having a formal, internally-developed training program, they used peer-to-peer and on-the-job-training, a third-party training program or no training program at all.

A lack of internal resources, employee free time and “the inability to make education decisions because of a health system partnership,” were the top three reasons why agencies didn’t have training programs.

While many agencies still struggle to recruit and retain staff members, most respondents said they did not need to go outside of the agency to hire contracted workers.

About 55% of respondents said they had not hired a contracted caregiver over the past year, dating back to July 2021. For those that did, 20% said they had temporary caregiver support five or more times, 13% said three to five times and 12% said one to two times.

Of those home care agencies that had to go outside of their walls and hire temporary staff members, about half of them hired independent workers who work for multiple agencies while the other half hired travel nurses.

The idea of hiring traveling nurses and nurses from other health care settings, however, remains unpopular. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they were at least somewhat uncomfortable or very uncomfortable hiring travel nurses or nurses from hospitals, nursing homes or alternative settings.