1. Top heavy management - Program Manager does her best, but is constantly weighed down by demands from regional management. Too many chiefs...
2. Wages - are competitive, but good luck getting all your hours in. GRS' preferred way of doing things is to hire SLPs for 20 hours in each building and make you run between at least 2 buildings, sometimes more. Also, they favor new grads because they can pay them less. If you are an experienced therapist of any kind, they will bully you until you leave. They do this by making it impossible to do your job. In my case the RPM was also a SLP who had to maintain her own productivity. She was as fair as she could be about it, but in most buildings GRS serves, ST is the least requested of all the therapies.
3. Time off - they only have 2 holidays -Thanksgiving and Christmas day. Good luck getting either off and you can forget about ever having both. And you can only take the paid day within 30 days.No extra pay for those 2 holidays if you work them, either. The lack of holidays makes it particularly difficult for parents of school age kids to plan vacations. This is also affected by their time off policies, which as of Oct '13 were changed. You now have to request time off 3-6 months in advance of when you want it, and you won't know if you actually get it until a few weeks before. And if you are, for example, the only SLP in a building, you'll never get it because upper management actively discourages using PRN help, because they "cost more". Summer vacation planning is brutal and ends up as staff arguments as to who can take when and for how long. You can't take off more than 1 week at a time. Sick time and snow days are non-existent. You will always be required to make days up on the following weekend. Again, if you have kids, this can be a major problem. So if you have to stay home with a sick kid, same policies apply.
4. Productivity - ranges from 80% to 99% depending on building and job. (RPMs are at 50%.) Impossible to meet without skirting the line between legal and fraudulent. They expect you to document while you are with your patients. In some cases, that's OK (like if you're just doing Vitalstim and cueing them to swallow). In other cases, it's not OK, like if you're trying to bring a patient our of their dementia shell and make eye contact, or an aphasic who needs to work on conversation. You have to do your documentation on Ipods, which do not work outside the gym anyway. Many elderly patients think we're being rude and just texting on our cellphones, and with their dementia, most don't understand the explanation that we are documenting. You are required to work with patients regardless of their condition. Even if they're unconscious. To the point of coding (saw quite a few code in the gym). All this stress means quite a bit of poaching goes on between the therapies, so you can have a very hard time being productive if you're not aggressive enough to tell others to back off so you can have time with a patient. I was basically required to clear my own, ST schedule with ALL the other therapists, at their convenience, not mine. I have 20 years of experience and was finding myself having to say "Hey X_____, it it OK with you if I see Mr Y____ at 10?" And then if the answer was no I'd have to go thru the whole schedule again. I don't blame the other therapists, I blame upper management for this.
5. Contract Buildings - having seen the Genesis owned buildings, there is a HUGE difference. The contract buildings are mostly awful. The one in Gainesville is filthy, smelly. The nurses make minimal efforts and are clearly understaffed and overworked. CNAs? There are 2-3 really good ones and the rest are just incompetent. Building management is also incompetent. I have never seen an admissions director or building director give family tours in pajamas until I worked here. I swear this is true. Called in on a weekend morning to give a tour, they would show up in pj bottoms and a hoodie sweatshirt. Nice first impression. Morons. There is little to no coordination between building management and rehab management, everything is an uphill battle, from equipment to diet orders to obtaining eval orders. And if you have to send a patient out for a swallow study? Good luck on that, too. Not only will it take forever to get it booked, chances are excellent that they'll forget to transport the patient, or they'll send the patient without a doctor's order.
6. Computer system - rarely works the way it's supposed to. It can take the better part of an hour to log on. And you can't do reports on the iPods, only daily notes. You will be expected to clock out or come in on weekends to do your paperwork. As I left, word was they were going to switch over to iPads only - no more laptops, and were going to require all therapists to clock in and out between patients. I'm no math genius, but doesn't that mean that really 100% productivity is expected? And doesn't that also mean that essentially Genesis is not paying therapists, merely passing on a percentage of Medicare reimbursement?
7. Career advancement - you can move up to RPM, beyond that not so much. Again, too many chiefs. And frankly, who wants that kind of stress? For that amount of stress you can open your own practice. RPMs are the most stressed out of all - pulled between their therapists, the buildings and the upper management. And they only get about $2 more per hour than therapists. I know this because I applied for a couple of these positions, but when I saw the pay rate, turned away from it completely. Not worth it unless you're looking to die young.
8. Recommendations for new grads - it's up to you. You will not receive the best supervision. You will not be truly mentored. If you're a lone wolf type, this may be Ok for you, but if you like being able to talk to peers, forget it, no one has time, and if you're the SLP, there's no one to talk to anyway. You will be running from building to building like everyone else. If you can endure it, you can get your license and move on. Or work in a pediatric setting, get your license and move on.
The only thing that got me through working for this company at all were a few of the patients, who really needed and appreciated my help. I felt sorry to leave a few of them behind in such a cruddy facility, but that's the way it is.
So read all the reviews. How the CEO maintains a 50% approval rating on this site is beyond me. Look at the dates. If you look closely you'll notice that prior to 2013, it was mixed reviews, and now it looks overwhelmingly negative. Also, notice that every time a negative post is put up, there's a positive one that follows it, almost always from PA? That's where the corporate HQ is - most likely these are planted posts.
I can't recommend working for GRS to anyone. Look elsewhere. Some of the other rehab cos. are just as bad, some not.