If you live in a state that hasn’t yet had its presidential primary and you’re wavering between Senators Obama and Clinton — or if you’re just curious to see where they stand on long-term care — check out their answers to 15 questions posed late last year by the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations.
All the then-current candidates were asked the same set of questions about policy issues affecting elders, but only Clinton and Obama answered. In response to question five — How would you improve the quality of life and quality of care for people in nursing homes and what would you do to ensure that a sufficient number of direct care workers are recruited and retained across the long-term care continuum? — Senator Clinton talks about strengthening the workforce with “a national system of background checks for long-term care workers and a $125 million investment in Workforce Investment Programs.”
Senator Obama is less specific, saying only that he would “start by ensuring that our long-term and geriatric care workforce the respect and support they deserve,” and that he supports “training more nurses and health care workers in geriatrics, working to improve the overall training of all long-term care workers at every level, and, in particular, focusing on the issue of helping to better understand and manage pain.”
“Michiganders would no doubt be shocked to learn that many of the 1 million residents of our state without access to health care are themselves health care workers,” says an excellent editorial in the May 9 Traverse City Record-Eagle. “Many nursing home workers, for example, are offered extremely expensive health care plans that will cover the worker but not their families.”
In “Health care workers don’t have benefits,” Marge Faville (pictured), a registered nurse and the secretary-treasurer for SEIU Healthcare Michigan, outlines the stories of three uninsured or underinsured workers, including Linda Braddock, a CNA in a nursing home, and home care worker Ernie Hobbs.
Hobbs, who cares for his disabled stepson, is “getting older but not quite eligible for Medicare, doesn’t have health insurance,” Faville writes. “He worries in particular about his son, who depends on Ernie for even the most basic tasks. ‘It scares me to think what would happen if I wasn’t around,’ Ernie says. ‘I’m getting old and I get scared every time I get a cough or something starts to hurt.’”
Modules on stress management and dealing with bereavement were the most effective parts of a training program designed to increase professionalism in personal assistance workers, according to a study published in the current issue of Home Health Care Management and Practice.
If you’re reading this, you probably know just how much our nation needs competent, confident and caring direct-care workers to fill the growing demand for home care services. You also know how important it is for home care workers to get the training and support they need to do the job right. But how often do you get the opportunity to help a would-be home health aide get the training she needs to join the field?
Well, now’s your chance. The SKILL Center, a New York City-based nonprofit job training and placement organization that is an affiliate of PHI, has been challenged by one of its funders to raised $20,000 in individual donations. To learn more about the center and how to donate, watch our video by clicking on the image above. Or just go to the SKILL Center website and click on the Donate Now button.
“Every day, my family and countless others trust direct care staff to care for our loved ones. Yet we pay them less than we pay many of the college students brewing skinny lattes at Starbucks. Meager staff pay and benefits are the shameful back story of the generally positive effort to move intellectually-disabled people out of state institutions into the community. Starting hourly wages for direct care workers are typically a dollar or two above minimum wage,” says a piece in the widely read Huffington Post. The posting calls for paying direct-care workers “a living wage.”
Rayshawn and most of his colleagues, Pollack points out, are paid through Medicaid, “a program that bleeds red ink in just about every state. Our Governor’s proposed FY2009 budget again includes no cost of living adjustment for these workers. Nothing new or surprising there. Politicians are rewarded by powerful constituencies for good provided…. Direct care workers are not a powerful constituency, and they are pretty invisible to most voters.”
As part of National Women’s Health Week last week, the PHI Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign delivered a sobering report – Invisible Care Gap: Caregivers without Health Coverage – on the health insurance status of our nation’s caregiving workforce, 90 percent of which is female.
Read more about the report and download a copy at our Health Care for Health Care Workers website.
If you live in a state that hasn’t yet had its presidential primary and you’re wavering between Senators Obama and Clinton — or if you’re just curious to see where they stand on long-term care — check out their answers to 15 questions posed late last year by the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations.
Clinton talks about strengthening the workforce with “a national system of background checks for long-term care workers and a $125 million investment in Workforce Investment Programs.”
“Michiganders would no doubt be shocked to learn that many of the 1 million residents of our state without access to health care are themselves health care workers,” says an excellent 
As part of National Women’s Health Week last week, the PHI Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign delivered a sobering report – Invisible Care Gap: Caregivers without Health Coverage – on the health insurance status of our nation’s caregiving workforce, 90 percent of which is female.
