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The National Direct Service Workforce Resource Center has released a white paper (pdf) that provides a first-ever overview of workforce challenges and practices across four critical service sectors:
- intellectual and developmental disabilities
- aging
- physical disabilities
- behavioral health
Usually, each of these sectors is studied and written about separately, reflecting a fragmentation that is deeply rooted in the separate funding, policy, service, and advocacy worlds of each of these sectors.
But this paper–written by a team of workforce experts (including PHI’s Steve Edelstein and Dorie Seavey) who span these service systems–takes a different approach. It sets out to investigate similarities and differences across the sectors in job titles and tasks, workforce demographics, supply and demand, job conditions and compensation, codes of ethical standards, training requirements, turnover, and career paths.
The report identifies a number of challenges facing all of these sectors, but, most importantly, according to lead author, Amy Hewitt of the University of Minnesota, “the paper also provides a call to action regarding the serious workforce problems that all disability and eldercare service sectors have in common.”
The authors identify the following areas for joint policy action:
- Improve DSW wages and access to benefits.
- Reform training and credentialing systems.
- Reform long-term care payment and procurement systems.
- Engage the public workforce and education systems to support recruitment and training of DSWs.
- Design worker registries and other supportive resources.
- Develop statewide stakeholder coalitions to develop and implement state level workforce development plans.
“What’s notable about this report, says Edelstein, PHI’s national policy director, “is that it represents the combined views of a cross-sector team of national workforce development experts. We have found tremendous common ground.
“This report has great value as a stepping off point for a new generation of federal advocacy on behalf of all direct-service workers and the clients they serve. I look forward to collaborating with our Resource Center colleagues to begin that effort.”
The DSW-RC is funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It supports efforts to improve recruitment and retention of direct service workers who help people with disabilities and older adults to live independently and with dignity. PHI provides workforce technical assistance services to the state grantees of the DSW-RC.
I’ve been waiting for someone to write this white paper for some time and am very excited about its conclusions. A year or two ago, I made a comment here on my experiences with direct care staff at the agency overseeing residential services for our developmentally challenged daughter, and with direct care staff at the skilled nursing facility in which my mother lives (and received a couple of responses from Elise Naknikian). I felt strongly that, because of the similarities in the challenges of recruitment and retention due to poverty level wages, resulting in high turnover rate, loss of valued staff, and discontinuity of care, there should be a joining of forces among those who serve and those who are served in those four critical sectors to create a cogent and cohesive advocacy for “joint policy action”. As I join our group of Family Advocates when we write letters to and visit our legislators, both state and federal, I’ll be watching to see what comes of the recommendations put forth by the authors of this important white paper report.