The Direct Care Alliance’s Voices Institute is looking for direct-care worker leaders to participate in its first five-day leadership training intensive. All travel, meal and lodging expenses will be paid for qualified attendees, along with a stipend of $80 a day.

DCA board member Vera Salter, PHI New York Training Manager MariaElena Del Valle, and DCA consultant Bob Hudek developed and will deliver the intensive, which will be held from May 18 to May 23 outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The DCA is asking worker associations and coalitions to nominate candidates for the intensive. Each organization may nominate multiple candidates. Nominations are due March 5.

Visit the DCA website for an invitation letter, application form, or more information.

Two long-term care coalitions are protesting the cuts in Medicare funding proposed by the Bush administration for fiscal year 2009. Both groups warn that the cuts would hurt long-term care recipients and the direct-care workers they rely on.

“From the standpoint of our oldest, most vulnerable seniors and the direct care workers who serve them, the Bush Administration has put forward a budget proposal that is dangerous to every aspect of front line care giving,” says Lisa Cantrell, a co-founder of the National Association of Health Care Assistants and a national spokesperson for the Coalition to Protect Senior Care (CPSC) in a CPSC news release.

“With as much as 70% of nursing home operating costs driven by labor costs, inadequate overall funding may force nursing homes to make difficult decisions that could affect the hundreds of thousands of direct care workers in nursing homes,” echoes Alan G. Rosenbloom, the president of the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, in an Alliance news release.

“Medicaid, a state program to aid the poor, is falling short of providing living wages and benefits to nursing home workers,” says Living Wages and Health Care Out of Reach: A report on the overlooked nursing home workers (pdf), a new report from SEIU Healthcare 775NW. The union surveyed frontline nursing home workers in Washington state and found a median starting wage for CNAs of $9.75 per hour, “well below the living wage of a single adult.”

Another major problem, the report notes, is lack of affordable health insurance. “In a recent survey of over 150 randomly-sampled Washington CNAs, only a quarter reported having health insurance from their employer. Although it is possible that a higher proportion of nursing homes/employers offer insurance to their employees, it is likely that employees are unable to pay the premiums.”

The report calls on the state to solve this problem by increasing the Medicaid funding targeted at improving wages and benefits for ”our much needed, inadequately paid nursing home workers.”

You can find a lot of useful information about the direct-care workforce on the Developing a Quality Workforce section of the newly revamped Institute for the Future of Aging Services (IFAS) website. 

The section describes past and current initiatives aimed at stabilizing and supporting the workforce. It also links to more than two dozen policy analyses, how-to issue briefs, and other publications.

IFAS’s approach to developing a quality workforce includes

“I’ve seen a tremendous change in the view of direct-care workers,” says researcher Barbara J. Bowers. “I don’t think you’ll find a lot of people in long-term care any more who say ‘They’re lazy, they’re incompetent, they don’t know anything.’ I think there’s a tremendous amount of respect.

“The trouble is, managers think it’s their job to come up with a solution when there’s a problem, and they don’t think to include the frontline workers. And that’s partly because the workers don’t have any time, because they’re usually worked to death.”

Looking at CNA work like an anthropologist

A professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Bowers has been studying how people live and work in long-term care facilities for nearly three decades.

After earning a master’s degree in nursing and a PhD in sociology, Bowers published her first study of direct-care workers “around 1980,” she says. Few others were researching the workforce at that time. “People were looking at what people did, but not what the experience was like. So I did a field study around 1984 where I looked at the work essentially like an anthropologist, working as a CNA for four months in a nursing home.”

Continue Reading

Members of the Iowa CareGivers Association (ICA) lobbied their legislators on January 29, talking about the need for better pay, better benefits, and better training and education for Iowa’s direct-care workers.

The caregivers also asked their legislators about their personal experiences with caregiving, as part of a push by the ICA to collect and publish stories of legislators and others who have been, in the words of the ICA’s theme for 2008, “touched by a caregiver.”

“The value of that is, it forces legislators to think completely differently about direct-care workers,” says ICA Policy Director John Hale. “When they start to think about direct-care workers in terms of their own lives, it becomes real, not just one of the hundreds of issues they have to deal with every day. It becomes more of a priority.”