Worker delivers bag of groceries to older woman at home

A Senior Helpers franchise is opening a state-of-the-art training center in Scottsdale, AZ, to better prepare the local community of caregivers and its own staff for the rigors of in-home care.

“Our incoming staff is young, so we have been working throughout the entire pandemic on upskilling people who have the right heart, who have the right drive to help people and all they need to do is learn the skills,” Senior Helpers franchise owner Tiffany Phelan told McKnight’s Home Care Daily.

Phelan’s main office is based in Scottsdale and the Mesa location serves as an operations center for her Senior Helpers franchise. She said that location has additional space, so she got the idea to use it as a training center after a discussion with a Senior Helpers executive last summer. The company has larger training centers in Baltimore and Chicago.

The training center will begin offering free 90-minute training classes starting Friday that will tap the expertise of various local organizations including a hospice and local emergency services providers. The classes will focus on topics such as end-of-life care and patient autonomy in a training setting that looks like a small apartment.

 Each class will accommodate up to eight people who work for Senior Helpers, or outside the franchise as family caregivers or community members who provide help to seniors.

“The idea here is not to bring in as many people as is humanly possible to Senior Helpers,” Phelan explained. “The idea here is to add something of value to the community. We want to be able to interact with every single person who comes in for training.”

Phelan acknowledged there could be an added benefit of offering free classes to caregivers outside of her franchise: it could act as a recruitment tool in a region where the demand for caregivers is far outstripping the supply.