2004 February Archive at PHInational.org

Feb. 25, 2004 - Founder of Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute (PHI) and Independence Care System (ICS), Rick Surpin has been a leader in the effort to promote quality jobs for home health aides and other direct-care workers. That leadership was recognized when Surpin was named an “Outstanding Social Entrepreneur” for 2004 by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Through international and regional meetings and supporting its outstanding entreprenuers, the Schwab Foundation promotes addressing social problems through innovative services, products, and approaches that are nonideological, practical, and replicable.

Surpin founded CHCA in 1985 and served as the company’s president until he launched ICS in 2000. CHCA was the country’s first worker-owned home care agency, and now employs over 750 home health aides, 70 percent of whom own shares in the company. Independence Care System is a managed care agency that supports people living with severe disabilities; many ICS clients rely on home health aides from CHCA to support and assist them so they can live independently in the community. The synergy of these two enterprises, along with the nonprofit PHI, which promotes the quality jobs/quality care model across the nation, has catapulted Surpin’s vision into the forefront of today’s discussions about the future of caring for America’s elderly and disabled populations.

Feb. 25, 2004 - Steven Dawson, president of the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, spoke at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting about improving working conditions in order to maintain a stable direct-care workforce.

On February 23, The NGA’s Health and Human Services Committee hosted a session on expanding home care as an option for the elderly and those living with disabilities. The subject matter reflected the group’s ongoing interest in long-term care reform, which is driven by the burgeoning demand for long-term care and services and states’ desire to keep their Medicaid budgets under control.

Dawson urged the governors to increase funding for wages and benefits and coordinate resources scattered among aging, long-term care, and labor departments in order to better support employers’ efforts to recruit, train, and retain workers. “I realize these are difficult times and increases in compensation will be difficult,” he said. “However, in the long run, because this is a market dynamic, demand will place an upward pressure on wages and benefits.”

Dawson also called for states to create not only more, but better, home care jobs. “Currently,” he said, “the states are rewarding inefficiency — a system churning through workers at 50 and 60 percent or more turnover rates, creating lousy jobs and not wonderful care. Instead, as you build expanded home care programs, you have an opportunity to build not just a care system, but also a stable workforce — and that will in turn strengthn low-income communities.

”In this time of precious resources,” he concluded, states should “find the points of leverage that will solve two problems with the same dollar — providing the elderly and disabled decent care, and providing low-income women decent jobs.”