On April 27, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Hitachi Foundation jointly received the 2010 Critical Impact Award from The Council on Foundations, in recognition of their work on a program that benefits frontline healthcare workers. Read the full story

PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release
July 6, 2009

Contact: Alex Olins
PHI Northern New England Director
Phone: (802) 655-4615
Email: aolins@PHInational.org

Rewarding Skill and Improving Care
New initiative provides career advancement opportunities for direct-care workers in Vermont

Burlington, VT — Few issues are more important to people today than health care. Both from a personal and societal perspective, Americans are deeply concerned about what the future holds for them when it comes to health care. In many states, the growing needs of an aging “baby boomer” generation are creating an enormous shortage in qualified direct-care workers, who provide most of the “hands on” home and community-based care that elders and people living with disabilities depend upon. Read the full story

Tapping the Power of Peer Mentoring

This is the second in a series of PHI Expert Interviews, which bring you insights from four senior PHI staff. They’re an impressive group – among the nation’s leading experts on long-term care’s direct-care workforce – and collectively they’ve spent decades studying the challenges facing the workforce and how to address them. We think you’ll be interested in what they’ve learned.

Peggy Powell is one of the founders of Cooperative Home Care Associates, the worker-owned home health agency that started PHI, where she served as director of education. Since joining PHI in 1991, she has worked with CHCA and other employers to develop strategies for recruiting, training, supervising, and supporting direct-care staff.

One of those strategies, peer mentoring, is gaining in popularity – and no wonder. Done right, a peer mentor program helps new direct-care workers get oriented to the job and the organization, bolstering their skills and their confidence. It also creates a career ladder for experienced workers.

And that’s not all, as Peggy has learned. Read the full story

Recommendations for Establishing a Credentialing System for Iowa’s Direct Care Workforce, (pdf) a recent publication from the Iowa Direct Care Worker Task Force, is a useful tool for advocates in any state who want to create “an accessible, comprehensible, flexible, quality system of education and training for all direct care workers.”

The report documents work to be done to implement recommendations published by the task force in December 2006.  Work began on the project last month.

Iowa’s proposed three-tiered credentialing system is intended to ensure that all direct-care workers are adequately prepared for the job. It also aims to make workers’ duties and qualifications clear to the consumers and family members who hire them, to acknowledge their special skills, and to correct the inequities of the current system, which requires training in some settings but not in others even when the same set of services is delivered in both.

Read the full story

The July issue of The Gerontologist is devoted to findings from the Better Jobs Better Care research and demonstration project. BJBC, which began in 2002 and ended in 2006, was the largest initiative in the nation ever created to address the high vacancy and turnover rates of direct-care workers by improving the quality of direct-care jobs. The initiative involved changing both public policy and employer practice. Demonstration grants were made to groups in Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

A nine-page overview lays out how and why the project came into being, the problems affecting the direct-care workforce, and how awareness of and responsiveness to those problems is changing. The essay is by Robyn Stone (pictured), executive director of the Institute for the Future of Aging Services, and PHI President Steven Dawson. FAS and PHI conceived of BJBC and provided technical assistance to the grantees. Funding was supplied by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies.

Among the findings detailed in the issue:

• Direct-care workers across long-term settings identified more pay, improved communication, better supervision, and being treated with respect as the most important things employers could do to improve jobs.
• After accounting for satisfaction with wages, benefits, and advancement opportunities — good basic supervision was most important in affecting CNAs to stay in their jobs.
• There is a positive correlation between CNA job commitment and resident satisfaction.
• After accounting for satisfaction with wages, benefits, and advancement opportunities, good basic supervision was the most important factor behind commitment to the job. Read the full story

If you want to reduce nursing assistant turnover at your facility, you need to improve working conditions — maybe hire more direct-care staff, give your supervisors management training, or include direct-care workers more in decision making and care planning. But motivating nursing assistants to stay in the profession long-term requires a whole different set of incentives. According to a new study, stemming the flow of workers from the profession will require system-wide changes like higher wages, better benefits, and more career advancement opportunities for all direct-care workers.

Many previous studies have analyzed nursing assistant turnover within a facility, but few have looked into why workers leave the profession. “Staying the Course: Facility and Profession Retention Among Nursing Assistants in Nursing Homes,” a study published in  the Journal of Gerontological Research Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, used data for 2,328 nursing assistants (NAs) from the 2004 National Nursing Assistant Survey to compare the reasons for both.

Read the full story