Brent Guerisoli: Yeah. So we don’t necessarily have rate renewals that are going to affect across the Board all at the same time. That being said, we anticipate increasing rates across the Board at different times at each of the locations and this is part of the function of the local leadership teams. As they look at the market, the communities and the pressures and whatnot, they’re making appropriate adjustments throughout the year. The other thing that’s really important to remember, there’s sort of two elements to this. One is the room and board rate increases. And then the second is on what we call our cares charges or the actual cares that we’re providing. And so what we’re doing there is really focusing on making sure that we’re charging for the services that we’re providing and ensuring that we’re putting the residents at the level, the appropriate clinical levels and then working with them really on a monthly or at least on a quarterly basis to address those needs and appropriately adjust the rates.
So we were encouraged by strong rate growth as we talked about and we would anticipate that growth to continue throughout the year.
Scott Fidel: Okay. And then just I had one more question. If you were able to provide us with an update on how your wage inflation trends progressed in the first quarter across the three business lines, I think, that you did show traction sequentially and sort of lowering the rate of increase across each of the three business lines, but would be helpful if you were able to share some figures with us?
John Gochnour: Yes. Scott, we continue to see some significant wage pressure, and I think, you’re seeing that it’s translating to about a 5% increase in both service lines in an overall wage inflation pressure. I think in the first quarter, we actually saw a little bit of a kickback in the wrong direction, which was disappointing. We continue to hope that we’ll see more and more normalization back to wage inflation that sort of corresponds with the changes in reimbursement that we’re receiving. That’s not the case yet. I think what we’re seeing is there are some positive trends and I think those are manifesting themselves as we’re able to, and we’ve seen improvement in our turnover, we’ve seen improvement in our employee engagement scores and what that’s driving is the ability to manage more effectively.
And so you’re seeing improvement on the margin side in part because we’re able to manage that labor even in spite of the inflation and the cost pressure that we’re experiencing in a more effective manner. And so that’s kind of what I would say is just it’s still 5% in both segments on a year-over-year basis. I think it ticked up from 0.9% in Q4 to 1.2% in this year, but we’re still looking at that 5% year-over-year, which is still significant and outside of our long-term expectations.
Scott Fidel: Okay. I understood that. And then just within the HH&H, is that pretty consistent across home Health and Hospice in terms of those 5% trends?
John Gochnour: Yeah. And we continue to look at that segment combined because so many of our operations operate as both a Home Health and a Hospice provider. So while we bifurcate the data in some cases on the labor inflation side, it makes sense to keep it combined.
Scott Fidel: Okay. Got it. All right. Thank you.
John Gochnour: Yeah.
Operator: Thank you. I’m showing no further questions. I’d like to turn the call back over to Brent Guerisoli for closing remarks.
Brent Guerisoli: Thank you, Michelle, and thank you everyone for joining us today.
Operator: Thank you for your participation. This does conclude the program and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.
