UPDATE: Read HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ response to this article.
The Washington Post Magazine ran a major feature article last Sunday that highlighted the disparity between the rising need for home-care workers and the poor wages and working conditions these jobs usually entail. Its author, Paula Span, referenced figures from PHI Director of Policy Research Dorie Seavey about the low wages paid to workers and the high turnover rates that undermine the quality of care.
“Marilyn Daniel’s Reward” (May 10) weaves the story of 91-year-old Rozzie Laney and her 63-year-old home-care aide Marilyn Daniel around a detailed explanation of the role of home health care workers and the generally poor quality of their jobs. In effect, it offers readers, within the context of a heart-warming story of compassion and care, a primer on the field of home health care and the human and policy-level issues that currently confront it.
Span underscores the strong desire of many elders not to live in nursing homes, since “Fairly or not, nursing homes are seen as grim thresholds to the grave, and years of hearings and headlines about deplorable conditions in some facilities have made seniors and their families willing to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid them.”
She says it isn’t easy to find “reliable, compassionate caregivers to help keep seniors in their homes” even in the current difficult economic climate, largely because “these demanding jobs are so poorly compensated. Benefits, particularly health insurance, are rare, and wages can be so low that many aides are eligible for food stamps.”
She points out that home-care aides are included every year on Forbes magazine’s list of the 25 worst-paying jobs in America, with mean annual wages for these aides putting them “ahead of shampooers and waiters, but behind parking lot attendants.” And she quotes figures from PHI’s Seavey that show a turnover rate of 40 to 60 percent a year.
“For the industry as a whole . . . the turnover rate remains alarming,” Span says. “It worries health-care researchers, labor economists and, most of all, the people trying to hire reliable aides for their aging relatives.”
Span is a long-time journalist for the Post and other publications, and is the author of the forthcoming book When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions, which she describes as “an attempt to look more deeply into the ways adult children help their parents navigate old age.”
