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There were no speakers and no breakout groups — just a fun time for all on a beautiful, sunny day at our June 14 celebration of the founding of the Virginia Association of Professional Nursing Assistants. The pictures are of our the board of directors — and our birthday cake.

Seeing all those direct-care workers in the same room at the same time was just what the doctor ordered, and it was a sight to behold.

While soaking in the smooth sounds of jazz by Paul Hardcastle, we enjoyed body massages, belly dancing exercises, games, cosmetic makeovers, and lots of good food.

On the serious side, we received a proclamation from the City of Hampton recognizing National Nursing Assistants Week.

Lorrene Maynard, CNA
Executive Director, VAPNA
professionalcna@hotmail.com   

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.

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In response to a recent solicitation for comments from the federal government, PHI recommended changes to the three main categories used to track direct-care workers at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The government considers revisions to its Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) categories every ten years.

PHI also asked the government to address the exclusion of direct-care workers who are “independent providers” from federal/state employer surveys, which PHI believes results in a serious undercount of workers counted as Personal and Home Care Aides. Independent providers refer to direct-care workers who are either self-employed or who are directly employed by consumer households.  

Workforce data can play a critical role in assessing things like the effectiveness of state initiatives to attract and retain greater numbers of direct-care workers, or the impact of policies designed to improve direct-care worker wages.

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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

Subscribe to the HCHCW newsletter

We’ve been covering news from our Health Care for Health Care Workers (HCHCW) campaign in PHI’s news stories and Quality Care/Quality Jobs newsletter ever since the campaign started years ago — and we’ll keep on covering the really big stories, since PHI’s beat is whatever affects the direct-care workforce.

But now HCHCW has launched its own free biweekly e-newsletter. The HCHCW newsletter drills deeper than anything else you’ll find into the shortage of affordable, quality health care coverage for direct-care workers. It analyzes the problem, explores solutions, describes the progress of the HCHCW campaign and its partner organizations, provides links to valuable resources, and more.

If you care about this crisis and want to keep up with the latest developments and strategies, you’ll want to add your name to their list.

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Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org

“I can honestly say that I love being a Shahbaz, and so do my fellow Shahbazim,” Edna Hess told the senators at a July 23 U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing.

Hess worked for years as a CNA at the Lebanon Valley Brethren Home in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, becoming a Shahbaz (the Green House® name for direct-care workers) when the home converted to the Green House® model nine months ago. Since then, she told the committee, not a single Shahbaz has left. “This a big improvement over my facility’s 23 percent annual turnover rate for nursing assistants, and an even bigger improvement over the national turnover rate for nursing assistants, which I understand to be slightly over 70 percent per year.”

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