By Jack Firneno
Wire Editor
Marina Poltavskiy was running late on a rainy morning to an award ceremony for her own company. But, she had a valid, and relevant, excuse: “Safety first, and I wasn’t speeding!”
Poltavskiy is the owner and administrator of VitaCare Home Health in Feasterville Trevose, and the accolade was the Governor’s Award for Safety Excellence. It’s a distinguished honor: this year, only five companies in the state received it, down from 10 last year.
VitaCare is the only organization in this region — the rest were west of Harrisburg — to receive the award, which was presented at the Buck Hotel last Tuesday morning. The company is also something of a rarity, as most of the recipients are in more industrial fields.
But, as Scott Weiant, assistant director for the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, noted before the ceremony, “Home health care is historically a high hazard environment.”
That’s in part because aides, therapists and other health professionals dispatched by companies like VitaCare have to work in clients’ homes rather than in work environments controlled by the business.
And, that’s a big reason why VitaCare received the award: According to Weiant, the company consistently goes “above and beyond” when it comes to addressing safety concerns.
In other words, VitaCare made its reputation for being one of the safest companies in Pennsylvania in large part because of how it staffs its clients and what the staff members do when they get there.
The company has a handful of in-house coordinators who speak languages from Chinese and Mandarin to Russian and Spanish. They match up non-English speaking clients with staffs who speak the languages. And, VitaCare provides in-depth training for those staffers in their native languages.
VitaCare also established a safety committee in 2012, which proactively investigate safety concerns, identified hazards at job locations and offers continuing in-house training to employees.
Efforts like these, Weiant said, have made the injury and accident rate for the company’s approximate 800 patients and 550 employees “virtually zero.”
But for Poltavskiy, the numbers aren’t nearly as important as the men and women her staff serves. At the ceremony, she mentioned how, along with their regular duties, VitaCare staffers check that each home has smoke detectors, fire escape plans and clear walkways.
“We want to ensure safety wherever our employees go,” she explained.
Poltavskiy also spoke about the $10 gift cards they have to buy bread and milk when a client has no food in the house. And the aide who literally walked miles in the snow because she knew her blind, bed-bound client was expecting her.
“It’s such a wonderful feat when you help somebody,” she noted.
That’s the culture that permeates VitaCare, starting with the smiles and jokes that greeted people from the Department of Labor as an employee gave them a tour of their office on Street Road.
And, there was Poltavskiy’s own quip about being late, followed by her insistence that her employees and guests take a longer-than-usual way from the office to the Buck Hotel in order to avoid a dangerous left turn.
That culture of being careful and being caring is at the core of why Poltavskiy founded the company over a decade ago.
“Our clients are our mothers, our fathers, our grandfathers and grandmothers. And, many of them are veterans,” she said at the ceremony. “Keeping them safe is at the heart of home care.”
