Quality Care through Quality Jobs

The Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute (PHI) works to transform eldercare and disability services. We foster dignity, respect, and independence―for all who receive care and all who provide it. The nation’s leading authority on the direct-care workforce, PHI promotes quality direct-care jobs as the foundation for quality care.

Our nation’s growing direct-care workforce now includes nearly 4 million home health aides, certified nurse aides, and personal care attendants. PHI works with providers, consumers, labor advocates and policymakers to strengthen these jobs, recognizing their potential to help unemployed women and their families to achieve economic independence. We develop not only recruitment, training, and supervision practices, but also the public policies necessary to support them.

To strengthen provider organizations and improve quality of care for elders and persons with disabilities, PHI provides extensive consulting services focused on managing change, strengthening teams, and building skills for person-centered care. Increasingly, PHI also offers entry-level, in-service, and incumbent worker training curricula to strengthen training for direct-care.

PHI Affiliates

Our work is anchored in New York City, where PHI sponsors a service network that provides high-quality home care for thousands of elders and people with disabilities, including:

• Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), a South Bronx home care agency owned by its 1,920 employees, which includes an employer-based training program that trains hundreds of inner-city women each year; and
• Independence Care System (ICS), a nonprofit managed care program that serves more than 3,000 individuals living with physical disabilities. 

In Philadelphia, PHI founded Home Care Associates, a 200-employee, worker-owned home care agency and training program.

PHI National and Regional Offices

PHI is based in the Bronx, NY. It established a Washington, DC, office in 2008 to more deeply engage federal policymakers on health care, aging, and workforce policy issues that impact direct-care workers and the quality of long-term care. In addition, PHI sponsors a regional program based in Lansing, MI.