What is the Role of the Director of Rehabilitation Facilities?
A director of rehab’s primary role is to ensure that the goal of the facility and the goal of the staff are one and the same. The director needs to keep the staff focused and ensure that the relationships between the therapists, doctors, and patients remain on track and lead to the overall goal of the facility without sacrificing the overall character of the operation.
What Experience Is Required to Be a Director?
While each facility will have its own particular criteria for the position, you can pretty much count on some standards as far as to what you will have accomplished in your career to this point in order to be considered for the opportunity:
- Current state license to practice in a specialized field
- Graduate degree completed in business or clinical specialty
- Ten years’ experience in your specialty with five being in a management or senior supervisor level
Functioning as a director will require you to wear many hats. Most facilities will require you to perform human resources functions; manage budgeting; communicate effectively between departments, doctors, and patients; train and discipline staff; and handle customer relations. These are but a few of the areas that you will have to function in, so you can see you will need to be a well-rounded individual in order to take on this responsibility.
What Are My Specific Job Duties?
Your supervision will consist of a broad scope. You will dictate the schedules and activities of all of your therapists and administrative staff along with handling the scheduling appointments for physicians. You will also be responsible for setting and ensuring weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals for your facility and for ensuring that all resources are being properly allocated so that your unit is achieving the maximum potential with its allocated funding.
It does not stop there either. You are the leader of a group of people and will need to act as such. It is your job to maintain the focus of the group and to ensure proper and positive relationships both with and amongst the staff members in your facility. You will be called upon as a trainer, mentor, and friend and will also have to fall into the role of parent and disciplinarian when needed.
Being in charge of a large group of personalities, you will need to adapt to every situation and individual as the situation dictates. Most people will not change their ways, so you are going to have to learn how to get the most out of each specific personality and how to help them work together. What works for one person will sometimes not work for another, and your greatest asset is going to be the ability to read a patient, doctor, or staff member properly and guide them into thinking your way and getting them to get and remain on the same page as you and the facility mission.
Another area of great concentration is going to be customer loyalty. After all, without our customers, we have no business and we need to keep them walking through the door. This is attained by ensuring the best of care with a personal touch that will separate your facility from the factories that are sometimes in the industry which pay no attention to their guests.
Word-of-mouth is one of the best forms of advertisement and worst forms of criticism you can receive. Your job is to focus on the staff and ensure that they are happy, content, and focused on their job, which will in turn lead to them performing their duties in a manner that will create the proper atmosphere to keep clients returning and telling anyone in need of therapy that your facility is the only place to be considered.
All in all, the director of rehab facilities is a wonderful position in therapy jobs with many challenges and opportunities. They are in charge of a select group of individuals that have chosen to help people for a living during one of the most challenging times of their lives. The satisfaction experienced when carrying out your duties is second to none. Are you ready for the challenge?
