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. Continue reading ‘PHI EXPERT INTERVIEW: Peggy Powell’
The Direct Care Alliance (DCA), a national advocacy organization for direct-care workers, is inaugurating its new midtown Manhattan headquarters on September 11.
After a half-hour reception, the program will begin at 6 p.m. with a welcome from DCA Board Chair John Booker. Executive Director Leonila Vega, Stacey Easterling of The Atlantic Philanthropies, and direct-care worker Bridget Siljander will also speak, followed by video highlights from the 2007 DCA convention.
See the invitation (pdf) for details and RSVP information.
Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org
A nursing home owner in the Bronx was arrested for failing to provide worker’s compensation for her employees. According to the August 7 issue of Crain’s New York Business, Helen Sieger was the first person in the state to be charged under the law, which makes it a felony for employers to fail to have workers’ compensation coverage for their employees.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Sieger failed to provide workers’ compensation insurance for hundreds of workers for more than a year, from late May 2007 to the end of this June. She was arrested on Wednesday.
Sieger is the owner and chief executive of the Kingsbridge Heights Care and Rehabilitation Center, whose workers have been on strike for six months, ever since Sieger stopped paying into their health care fund.
Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org
New York state has been “a national leader” in expanding health care coverage for home care aides and other workers, yet 30 percent of its home care workers lack insurance, according to a fact sheet from PHI’s Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign.
Caregivers Without Health Care focuses on home care workers because they are the largest and fastest-growing segment of the state’s direct-care worker population. It explains the conditions contributing to the high rate of uninsurance among direct-care workers, including low wages that make it difficult to afford premiums and copays.
Read more and comment
The Direct Care Alliance is looking for a staff member and a consultant to help it grow.
The fulltime position is for an administrative coordinator for the national, New-York based advocacy group. This person will have “a broad range of responsibilities that involve working directly with the Executive and the National Advocacy Directors of the Direct Care Alliance,” according to the job description.
The consultant position is a six-month opportunity for a direct care worker specialist. The DCA is looking for someone with experience in providing direct care and “a passion for the profession of being a direct care worker,” as well as a good understanding of the challenges workers face. Job duties include helping with the design and implementation of the Voices Institute, the National Partnership of Associations and Coalitions, and other DCA activities.
Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org
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