Caring in America Report
By 2011, the year PHI published Caring in America, our seminal report on home care, the industry was exploding in size. In Caring in America, PHI estimated that between 2008 and 2018, the U.S. home care workforce would grow four to five times faster than jobs in the overall economy. Yet as the report concluded, these jobs were threatened by poor compensation, sub-par training, and weak investment from long-term care and government leaders alike. A workforce shortage was inevitable.
At the time of its publication, no report had tackled the home care industry with such depth and detail—in it, we described the state of home care workers and their employers, as well as the complex service delivery systems supporting older adults and people with disabilities in this country. It also reviewed the state and federal context of wage and overtime protections for this workforce, paving the way for a 2013 advocacy victory co-driven by PHI when the U.S. Department of Labor extended wage and overtime protections to two million home care workers nationwide. The goals of the report—to promote a better understanding of this workforce and to generate responses from both the home care industry and policymakers—are ones that form a central part of PHI’s work to this day.
