Feb. 25, 2004 - Steven Dawson, president of the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, spoke at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting about improving working conditions in order to maintain a stable direct-care workforce.

On February 23, The NGA’s Health and Human Services Committee hosted a session on expanding home care as an option for the elderly and those living with disabilities. The subject matter reflected the group’s ongoing interest in long-term care reform, which is driven by the burgeoning demand for long-term care and services and states’ desire to keep their Medicaid budgets under control.

Dawson urged the governors to increase funding for wages and benefits and coordinate resources scattered among aging, long-term care, and labor departments in order to better support employers’ efforts to recruit, train, and retain workers. “I realize these are difficult times and increases in compensation will be difficult,” he said. “However, in the long run, because this is a market dynamic, demand will place an upward pressure on wages and benefits.”

Dawson also called for states to create not only more, but better, home care jobs. “Currently,” he said, “the states are rewarding inefficiency — a system churning through workers at 50 and 60 percent or more turnover rates, creating lousy jobs and not wonderful care. Instead, as you build expanded home care programs, you have an opportunity to build not just a care system, but also a stable workforce — and that will in turn strengthn low-income communities.

”In this time of precious resources,” he concluded, states should “find the points of leverage that will solve two problems with the same dollar — providing the elderly and disabled decent care, and providing low-income women decent jobs.”