Today there are nearly 4.6 million direct care workers in senior care, including state tested nursing assistants (STNAs), home health aides, and personal care aides. Surprisingly, almost 2.5 million work in home health, partially due to the desire to keep seniors out of long-term care facilities post-Covid-19. The remaining 2.2 million work in assisted living, personal care homes and skilled nursing facilities.
Direct care staff play a critical role in providing the hands-on care and daily support to older adults and seniors with chronic illnesses, cognitive loss and various disabilities. The struggle to keep competent direct care staff is nothing new and has been one of the biggest challenges in senior care for decades.
Many challenges face leaders in senior care including low wages, limited training, high turnover, poor career development opportunities, and an increasingly medically complex population of seniors requiring intensive care. The challenges also negatively affect recruiting new talent and retaining good employees. The bottom line is that high turnover, poor retention and low recruitment threatens the very quality of care and life seniors deserve.
Ask any direct care professional in senior care how difficult his or her job may be and they will provide any number of responses including:
- Job-related physical pain and injury
- Intensive relational skills and emotional labor
- Increased acuity of resident conditions
- Challenging behaviors due to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias
- Heavy workloads due to high turnover
- Scheduling challenges
- Limited training and career advancement prospects
- Inadequate supervision and management
It’s not difficult to understand why there is a current crisis in recruiting and maintaining a stable workforce among direct care staff in senior care, but consider this – COVID-19 magnified just how important front-line staff are and the difficult job they have on a daily basis. Senior care companies would not have survived without them. Nor would the older adults who made it through the pandemic.
Although “hazard pay” was offered to many caregivers at very high rates, it was indeed possible for a while. If senior care companies were willing to pay more to direct care staff through a crisis, isn’t there some way to reconfigure a new baseline wage for these crucial employees?