Pressure on home care industry

The demand for in-home care is growing by leaps and bounds, putting pressure on the home care industry to produce enough workers to meet the demand and provide high-quality care. A webinar on Tuesday addressed some of the ways the industry can ensure it meets the needs of an aging population.

Hosted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and Caring Across Generations, a campaign to give voice to home care workers, the webinar’s central theme was that offering training to home care workers is key to being able to attract and keep workers in the industry and provide quality care to care recipients.

[See also: Home care hiring practices cause for worry]

High turnover in this industry strains clients, employers and workers. Providing training and standards for workers is a good way to stabilize turnover and benefit all stakeholders said Jane Henrici, PhD, IWPR study director. Training would likely mean better pay rates and offer workers a career path, both solutions to stemming high turnover, she noted.

As studies have shown, training requirements and standards for workers providing in-home care are non-existent or vary widely from state to state. This, said panelist Jessica Brill Ortiz, “makes it really difficult for consumers and other employers to assess the knowledge and skills of the workers that they hire.”

“Agency employers have to create their own assessment procedures, policy makers have no national standard to depend on and workers have no way to demonstrate their professionalism and skills, which makes it even harder for them to advance in their career,” she said. Brill Ortiz is the national advocacy coordinator of the Direct Care Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group for the direct-care workforce. The DCA has created a professional competency-based credentialing test for personal assistance workers in home- and community-based settings.

Steve Edelstein, the national policy director of the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, pointed out that there are a number of federally-funded pilot programs under way across the country that may serve as the backbone of a future national training standard for workers.

[See also: Explosion of direct-care workforce will cause industry change]

“It’s an area that’s getting a lot of attention and presumably will continue to get a lot of attention as the demand for these services continues to grow,” he said.