In two recent interviews in newsletters for health care professionals, long-term care experts discussed ways of better supporting direct-care workers.

Interviewed in the summer issue of IGSW News,  (doc) the newsletter of Boston University’s Institute for Geriatric Social Work, PHI President Steven Dawson says: “The workforce crisis in long-term care is at last getting some attention, but we have a ways to go to reach policymakers and show them that solutions already exist.” Dawson says the key to getting policymakers’ attention is for coalitions including long-term care providers and workers of all kinds to speak with one voice.

That’s not easy either, he acknowledges, since each of the professional groups is “resistant to change, looks inward, and protects is own territory,” but it can be done. As examples, Dawson points to the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes campaign and a “stakeholder table” currently exploring ways of implementing recommendations from the recent Institute of Medicine report on the health care workforce.

And in “Five Questions for Lynn Friss Feinberg: Perspectives on Aging From Capitol Hill,” Friss Feinberg (pictured) talks about direct-care workers in three of her five answers. Friss Feinberg, the deputy director of the Family Caregiver Alliance’s National Center on Caregiving, praises the proposed Caring for an Aging America Act of 2008 bill (S. 2708), in part because it would “expand career advancement opportunities for direct care workers by offering specialty training in long-term care services.”

The interview ran in the June issue of ASA Connection, a publication of the American Society on Aging.

Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org