“Meeting so many other direct support professionals who are passionate about making changes that are necessary to benefit the DSP workforce, and getting to know them over the course of the week, was very inspiring for me,” says Bridget Siljander of the Voices Institute. “And I learned so much about community organizing, coalition building, fundraising, issue campaigns. A very concentrated, organized, very focused training – basically, a boot camp in organizational development — is just what I needed at this point. I feel like I came away with an excellent toolkit for taking the next steps to develop my professional association.”

Siljander, a home health aide from Plymouth, Minnesota, and president of the Direct Support Professional Association of Minnesota, was one of 25 direct-care workers from 12 states who attended the Institute from May 18-23. The goal of the five-day intensive training, which was hosted by the Direct Care Alliance (DCA), was to help direct-care worker advocates develop their leadership skills.

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A dementia care guide that has been helping direct-care workers since 2006 is now better than ever.

Knowledge and Skills Needed for Dementia Care: A Guide for Direct Care Workers in Everyday Language helps direct-care workers determine whether they have the skills they need to deliver person-centered dementia care — and where to go for assistance if they need training. It also helps supervisors, policymakers, and others evaluate dementia care training programs. It was developed by a team of experts and reviewed by many more, including more than 60 home health aides and CNAs.

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“Offering affordable health care coverage is an effective way of improving the quality of long-term care services by improving the quality of direct-care jobs. I’m glad to see this strategy getting more recognition from researchers and policymakers,” says Carol Regan, Director of PHI’s Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign.

Regan wrote one of the papers in A Compendium of Three Discussion Papers: Strategies for Promoting and Improving the Direct Service Workforce: Applications to Home and Community-Based Services. All three offer concrete solutions and list resources for people interested in strengthening the direct-care workforce in home- and community-based care. The compendium was issued by the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy.

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A three-month strike for health care benefits at a nursing home in New York’s west Bronx has drawn the attention of a couple of national heavy hitters: Presidential candidate Barack Obama and the New York Times.

According to a May 26 article in the Times, Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation and Care Center stopped paying health insurance premiums for its workers last August, so their coverage ended. On February 20, 220 workers went on strike, calling on the home to reinstate coverage and its contract with 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.

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PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release

America Faces Caregiving Crisis: One Million New Direct-Care Workers Needed by 2016

National Health Care Worker Advocacy Group PHI Reports on Rapid Growth in Demand for Direct-Care Workers

Bronx, NY, May 27, 2008— By the year 2016, America will need 1 million additional direct-care workers to care for its rapidly growing elderly population. Already facing difficulty recruiting workers for these low-wage occupations, elders and people with disabilities fear that without support from policymakers to improve jobs, there will not be enough workers to assist them.

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“Direct-care staff members are the cornerstone of quality. There should be two types of nursing homes: the excellent and the nonexistent. Staffing makes the difference,” says Larry Minnix in a letter to the editor of the New York Times.

The letter comments on an article about a recent Government Accountability Office report (pdf) on the need to reform the nursing home survey and certification system. The report, Minnix points out, ignores the critical fact that the current system “does little to examine the most important indicator of quality: staffing.”

Minnix, who is president and chief executive of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, says “We cannot fine our way to quality improvement, but we can achieve the quality people deserve by rewarding nursing homes that recruit, retain and train talented people.”

Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org