Steven Dawson

PHI President Steven Dawson comments on the importance of including direct care workers in the economic recovery plan.

The Obama administration’s economic recovery team is under increasing pressure to create and improve jobs for those most in need: low-income workers, particularly women. To that end, PHI and others have proposed targeted increases in Medicaid to create and strengthen the eldercare/disability services workforce–the millions of jobs held by home health aides, certified nurse aides, and personal care workers. But so far, the response from the Obama team has been a flat “no.”

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The newest additions to PHI’s National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce:

Caregiver Training in America and Southern California – This report is national in scope, but special emphasis is placed on Los Angeles and Orange Counties in Southern California. It provides a systematic representation of how in-home care workers are trained–in what settings, what content is provided, presence of special modules, hours of training, types of caregivers trained, and ”best practices” used.

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Pioneer Network, an organization formed in 1997 to advocate for culture change in eldercare, is celebrating a decade of success with the launch of a new website.

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U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), a member of the Senate Aging Committee, has introduced the Promoting Small House Nursing Homes Act (S.3732) to improve and increase person-centered long-term residential care and coordinated health care for older Americans.

Specifically, the bill would:

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Following through on its announcement last June, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has updated its Nursing Home Compare website to include a quality rating system that assigns from a low of one to a high of five stars to each of the 15,800 nursing homes in the United States that participate in Medicare or Medicaid.

Results for a New Hampshire nursing home.

“Our goal… is to provide families a straightforward assessment of nursing home quality, with meaningful distinctions between high and low performing homes,” said CMS Acting Administrator Kerry Weems.

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