Pros
-Working for this company is an opportunity to work in skilled nursing facilities/assisted living facilities, which are great settings for therapists who want to work with the elderly, a wonderful and rewarding population with which to work -The company provides continuing education courses online, which can be used as credit toward license maintenance. This is both good and bad, as it also means that they will not pay for any hands-on courses or certification programs provided by other parties. -My experience with area directors was positive, in that they would come to buildings periodically and at least make it sound as though they were interested in listening to employee concerns, even if nothing of significance was ever done to address them.
Kontras
-The company plugs and expects you to memorize a list of core values, which include integrity and compassion; it claims that these are the key to being an "Elite" therapist (actual used term). Aside from being hokey, this campaign comes across as insincere, as in practice FP appears to operate just like all of the big, profit-oriented therapy companies that dominate the setting. -There is no felt incentive to do your job well, aside from one's own self-motivation. Office morale is horrible. There are no bonuses, pay raises, or significant perks of any kind, and the provided benefits are miserable. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if employees felt supported at least as therapists, but unfortunately that's not the case at all. The dreaded productivity levels are in full force with this company, meaning that therapists are constantly under pressure to see as many patients as possible for as many minutes as possible. There is no time provided for session planning or paperwork, and necessary parts of the job such as chart reviews, family education, and conferences with nursing/staff/physicians are not accounted for as productive time - you are expected to be treating 90% of the time you are punched in or risk termination. This means that treatment quality suffers, as therapists are expected to type up lengthy documentation while clocked in with the patients. The supposed justification for this is that patients should provide active input regarding therapy goals and be informed of their progress, which while absolutely true in theory does not always work out in practice, resulting in many therapy sessions amounting to the therapist typing away while patients with cognitive impairments sleep or sit in silence. -The company's technology and IT support is a mess. The systems used for the above mentioned documentation are buggy and unresponsive, resulting in frequent system crashes and even loss of documents. This means that even more time is taken out of the therapists' day having to retype paperwork or otherwise deal with tech issues, but the company is slow to resolve problems and often just waves off these difficulties as "user error". Even worse, updates to these programs are rolled out without any warning to the employees, who must then discover new quirks and glitches while out in the field, resulting in even more lost time and "productivity."
