David Broder sent us this report earlier this week.
This Monday, the Fairfax County Long Term Care Coordinating Council (LTCCC) hosted a reception in Fairfax, Virginia, to honor Direct Support Professionals Appreciation Week. It was wonderful to see direct support professionals be honored for the important work they do - and even more wonderful to see them come together and talk about the improvements they need to see in order to stay in these jobs.
The reception drew a large crowd of direct support professionals and those who use their services - probably about a hundred people. Volunteers, most of whom were people who rely on personal support services, gave flowers to all the direct support professionals there. This was an opportunity to pause and give thanks to people who work really hard, and you could see on people’s faces that they appreciated the support.
Julianna Arslanian, a home care worker and a member of the Virginia Association of Personal Care Assistants, received a proclamation on behalf of all DSPs from Gerry Connolly, the chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (see photo). “I love this work,” she said. “All of us here today do. And we appreciate your recognition and your support. When we work together - policy makers and direct support professionals - we can make this work a little better so that we can continue to provide quality care to the seniors and people with disabilities who need it.”
Other speakers included Connolly, the chair of the LTCCC, and the assistant deputy secretary of Health and Human Resources for the state of Virginia.
David Broder, State Director, Virginia Association of Personal Care Assistants
dbroder@virginiapca.org
“There’s really no mystery here,” says PHI President Steven Dawson in an interview about solving the staffing problem in long-term care. “It’s a matter of providing a living wage, healthcare coverage, support, and recognition of what these workers do and providing the training they need to do the job well. It’s a matter of political will.”
“The fundamental problem has to do with the industry’s current basic business model of low-investment, high-turnover,” Dawson adds. “It’s based on the assumption that there’s a virtually endless supply of these workers, but I believe that the era of an endless supply of labor is coming to an end…. The approach to dealing with this new era will instead have to be “high-investment” on several fronts.”
The interview was conducted by Richard Peck, editor of Long-Term Living magazine, for the magazine’s website.
Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org
Listen to the podcast at the HCHCW website
“This workforce is uninsured at a rate of twice the general population,” says Carol Regan, director of the PHI Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign, of direct-care workers in long-term care services. “Yet they’re much more likely to be injured or sick on the job. They have the highest rate of injury and illness of any workforce: higher than truckers, higher than roofers, higher than miners. Which is astonishing.”
Regan outlines the health care dilemma faced by direct-care workers in a seven-and-a-half-minute podcast about The Invisible Care Gap, a recent publication from HCHCW.
“Nursing administrators who want to promote staff-supportive culture in their facilities should recognize the key role of staff resources,” concludes a study in Journal of Gerontological Nursing, Vol. 34 No. 3. “Efforts to ensure adequate staff resources (in terms of number and mix of staff) might be most effective in facilitating staff-supportive organizational culture.”
“Predictors of Staff-Supportive Organizational Culture in Assisted Living“ (free to subscribers only) is based on a study of 294 staff members in 52 Maryland assisted living facilities. Most of the workers were nursing assistants. The survey measured employees’ perceptions of teamwork, morale, information flow, involvement, supervision, and quality of meetings.
Staff in facilities licensed to provide higher levels of care rated their organizational culture as significantly more supportive than their peers in facilities providing lower levels of care - maybe because they are generally better staffed, hypothesizes author Elzbieta Sikorska-Simmons.
The second strongest predictor of staff-supportive organizational culture was a facility’s size, with smaller facilities ranked higher. Staff in small facilities were more demographically homogeneous and less structurally segregated (e.g., African-American employees were more likely to occupy professional positions), which leads to more cooperation and a more socially cohesive work environment.
Continue reading ‘Adequate Staffing Key to Staff-Supportive Culture’
If you ever wanted a quick, clear, jargon-free way to explain consistent assignment to someone else – or if you’re not too sure about it yourself — you might want to check out the new two-page fact sheet (pdf) from the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes campaign.
The fact sheet is part of a series that lay out the goals of the campaign. Consistent assignment, which is goal #8, is defined as ensuring that ”residents see the same caregivers (registered nurse, licensed practical nurse or certified nurse aide) or team of caregivers almost every time they are on duty” in order to “build and sustain relationships between individual residents, their families and friends and nurse aides.”
The publication lists the benefits of consistent assignment for residents, caregivers, and nursing homes. It also offers tips for consumers, telling them how to tell if a home uses consistent assignment and how to encourage its use if it doesn’t.
The campaign considers a home to be successfully using consistent assignment if staff care for the same residents on at least 80 to 85 percent of their shifts.
Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org
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