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

Supporting Culture Change: Working Toward Smarter State Nursing Home Regulation — This October 2009 issue brief by the Commonwealth Fund argues that traditional methods of regulating nursing homes can actually impose barriers to culture change. In certain cases, existing regulations have prohibited efforts to establish more worker-friendly staffing patterns, alter the organizational hierarchy in nursing homes, and redesign facilities to be more homelike. The authors suggest that surveyors adopt new regulatory standards — which they dub “smart” regulation — that would take culture-change efforts into consideration while still holding substandard nursing homes accountable.

Protecting Home Health Care Workers: A Challenge to Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Planning — This article, published in the October 2009 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, begins by noting that the home health care workforce may be unusually vulnerable to a pervasive flu outbreak. The authors propose a number of preparatory measures to mitigate the risk involved with a pandemic event. The measures include income-protection programs to ensure that flu-stricken workers are paid for taking time off; special influenza training sessions to teach workers how to communicate and coordinate during a flu crisis; and the widespread distribution of various flu-prevention materials, including vaccines, antiviral drugs, respirators, surgical masks, and gloves.

PHI’s National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce is a national online library for people in search of solutions to the direct-care staffing crisis in long-term care. It houses over 800 articles, reports, issue briefs, and fact sheets on the direct-care workforce.