Direct Care Workforce

Completed over an 18 month period in 2004-2005, this project was conceived of as an activity that met the objectives of the Maine Real Choice Systems Change grant and the mission of the Maine Personal Assistance Services Association to build recognition and opportunity for the direct care, direct support, and personal assistance workforce through education, public awareness and professional development. Each story evolves out of a series of in-depth interviews and is told in the worker’s voice.

As part of its CPASS grant, Alaska developed a curriculum for personal care assistant training. This curriculum goes through the various responsibilities that a home health worker would encounter. The curriculum is a total of 40 hours, followed up by written exams. These are the appendices to go along with Alaska's Personal Care Assistance 40 Hour Training Curriculum

This document is from the Aging and Disability Policy Summit. It notes the priority areas regarding aging and disability policy. They are: housing, transportation, health care, employment, education, and community participation. This worksheet provides a valuable framework for defining issues, activities and goals needed to enact change.

This brief recognizes the issues that face home care workers – including low wages, difficult work, and few, if any, benefits. At the same time, demands for home health care are increasing. This document, written on behalf of the Service Employees International Union, advocates on behalf of home health workers to raise wages in order to encourage participation in a workforce that assists Illinois vulnerable populations.

Is there a growing recognition that loneliness, helplessness, and boredom plague long-term care? This report examines six issues facing policymakers: financing and insurance, supporting and educating caregivers, the challenges of changing the physical and organizational environments in which services are delivered, recruiting and retaining a qualified workforce, designing a more effective regulatory control system, and adapting and integrating health information technology to long-term care.

This report describes examples of more narrowly focused state legislation that is setting the policy and infrastructure for consumer direction, expanding the direct care workforce, and supporting persons who return to the community after living in institutions. The Appendix includes the specific legislative language of selected bills covered in the report.

The Home Care Quality Authority is a small agency of Washington State government. Their website offers several ways for users to find and hire an in-home providers plus a referral registry to find work as an in-home provider. The site also contains a resource clearinghouse, news and links, and training material.

The Nurse Delegation Invitational Forum brought together 28 participants from seven states to discuss the involvement of unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP) in the provision of health care tasks to long-term care consumers through nurse delegation and consumer direction. The Oregon long-term care system served as the forum centerpiece, with presentations by staff from state programs, the board of nursing, practicing nurses who delegate and visits to several sites in the Portland area.

Rutgers Center for State Health Policy convened national and state thought leaders in nursing practice and regulation to develop consensus principles to guide the profession's collaboration with people who want to live in their homes and communities. The 2004 draft principles were revised and endorsed by the American Academy of Nursing's Expert Panel on Aging in November 2005. They are offered as a foundation for further dialogue within and across states.

The US is experiencing a severe shortage of qualified direct-care workers to provide personal care services (PCS). Evidence from a number of studies reveals that wages and benefits paid to PCS workers play a fundamental role in determining the quality and quantity of workers. Read this in-depth analysis of state and local practices that reviews the pros and cons of seven strategies for enhancing PCS-worker wages and benefits for direct-care workers delivering Medicaid personal care services.