Check-up time: 5 operation trends in senior living
Maximizing assets across senior living communities
The senior living industry is facing a conundrum: find a way to do everything with limited resources. But senior living communities also face rising costs in a time when funding is sparse. And with high priorities related to resident safety paired with minimal visibility into the needs of facilities managers, it can be challenging to know where to best allocate maintenance and operations spending.
From boosting the quality of experience for associates and residents to modernizing communities, administrators must find ways to pay for it all while tackling the challenges of hiring and staffing across functions.
Senior living is a complex use case; with a day-to-day, unquestioned need to provide time-critical, clean and safe services to the community, there aren’t shortcuts for asset managers to ensure communities perform optimally. Now, leaders need to think more proactively about how to address aging and less energy-efficient facilities. Managing an asset over its lifecycle is one key to maintaining the communities needed by associates and residents—so long as funding can be found to support operations.
To gain alignment, everyone from the executive director or person signing off on the budget to the maintenance and operations (M&O) professionals that keep communities running needs a common language and tools to gather data to make and justify budget decisions. Equipment and materials upgrades are necessary to satisfy health and safety requirements. At the same time, aging communities call for structural improvements, energy efficiency updates, and staff to maintain operations and upkeep.
Amidst staffing challenges, aging infrastructure expenses and new compliance regulations ignited by the pandemic, organizations have no option but to spend wisely. COVID-19 urgently redirected budgets from community upgrades to focus on airflow, HVAC and procuring PPE. Now, leaders are tasked with rebalancing funds needed for short- and long-term improvements—and ensuring positive senior living resident and associate experiences.
In this guide, we’ll explore five of the most pressing market trends affecting senior living communities and share how the administrators and operations leaders who manage them can leverage data to tackle challenges, including:
- Health and safety of workers and patients
- Supply chain-driven cost increases
- Growing complexity of assets
- Rising energy costs
- Sustainability
