A newly awarded federal grant will fund continuing research and analysis on how to strengthen and support the personal assistance services workforce.

The University of California San Francisco’s five-year-old Center for Personal Assistance Services (PAS Center) learned last week that is has been funded for another five years by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. In a news release about the grant, Charlene Harrington (pictured), the Center’s director and principal investigator, describes the center’s goal as “providing support so that people with disabilities can live and work independently in their community, as opposed to being institutionalized in a nursing home.”

Starting this October, the center will focus on three areas under the $4.25 million grant: improving access to PAS by individuals with disabilities; improving the workforce to support individuals with disabilities, and understanding the complexities of the economics of PAS. The center has done research documenting low wages, a scarcity of health care benefits, and high turnover rates among PAS workers.

As a major subcontractor to the PAS Center, PHI has supplied the center with best practices information and data from the state pages of its National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce. It is also preparing a state chartbook on PAS worker wages.

Over the next five-year period, PHI will launch three major workforce-related projects for the PAS center:

1. Create and disseminate a state-by-state database on registries and other consumer/worker intermediaries, and evaluate their effectiveness from the perspective of consumers, workers, and state officials.
2. Evaluate the effectiveness of state efforts to improve PAS wages and benefits and increase the number of PAS workers. Monitor state trends in the number and diversity of PAS workers, their pay, and turnover and vacancy rates.
3. Evaluate the state of PAS training state by state, analyze promising initiatives, and identify the components of effective PAS training programs.

“PHI is grateful to NIDRR and the PAS Center for their ongoing support of our study of states’ efforts to invest in a quality personal assistance workforce adequate to meet consumer demand,” says PHI National Policy Director Steve Edelstein. “I hope it is indicative of increased federal attention across agencies to the importance of this workforce — and the vital role these workers play in ensuring that people with disabilities can live more active lives in their communities.”

Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org