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August 14, 2006
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In This Issue:
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Recent Additions
Click here
to see what's new in the Clearinghouse.
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Low-Income Workers Discuss the Impact of Job Training
Home care aides and other low-wage workers talk about the impact of
their job training on their families and themselves in
Skills to Live By: Participant Reflections on the Value of their Sectoral Training Experience.
The 40-page Aspen Institute report also covers challenges the
workers still face, such as the difficulty of finding affordable
child care, medical care, and transportation.
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A State-by-State Look at TANF Policy
Getting On, Staying On, and Getting Off Welfare: The Complexity of State-by-State Policy Choices
reviews state variations in the Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF) program. The Urban Institute issue brief includes a
table that summarizes the variations, as of 2003, in such areas as
the minimum hourly work requirement, the obligation to look for a job
when applying for TANF, and the benefit reductions for infractions of
TANF rules.
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Clearinghouse Sheds Light on State Workforce Development Policy
A new online clearinghouse from The Workforce Alliance houses
information about state workforce development policy across six major
federal programs, including the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), TANF,
and Adult Education and Family Literacy. The
State Training and Education Policies and Statistics (STEPS)
Clearinghouse was launched last month. Each state (and the
District of Columbia) has a home page in STEPS, which includes a link
to an interactive database of policy information users can search for
funding, participation, and performance information.
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Dear Friend
If you're one of the new subscribers who signed up for
Quality Jobs/Quality Care at the Pioneer conference earlier
this month, welcome! We hope you find it useful - and let us know if
you have any news for us. In case you do, you'll find my contact
information at the bottom of every issue.
Meanwhile, the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute,
Quality Jobs/Quality Care's parent organization, remains in
hiring mode, with several more new positions open. If you or a friend
might be interested in one of them, please visit our
website and scroll down
to Employment to read the job descriptions and application
information.
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Iowa AARP Members Care about Caregivers
Iowa seniors want direct-care workers to be trained, paid well, and
offered affordable health insurance.
Bringing it Home: AARP Iowa Member Opinion on Direct Care Worker Quality and Long-Term Care Access
reports the results of a pair of surveys AARP Iowa conducted last
fall to gauge the opinions, experiences, and expectations its members
have about people who provide hands-on personal care. A thousand
people responded to a survey about nursing home care and just over a
thousand to one on home care, for response rates of 40 and 48 percent
respectively.
Click
here
for details.
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Special State Licensure Recognizes Advances in Workforce Culture
North Carolina recently became the first state to reward long-term
care providers who invest in building a high-quality direct-care
workforce.
The
North Carolina New Organizational Vision Award
(NC NOVA), which will go into effect next January, provides a special
licensure designation for nursing homes, adult care homes, and home
care agencies that meet voluntary higher standards for workplace
culture. Standards fall under four major areas: supportive
workplaces, training, career development, and balanced workloads.
Click
here
for the rest of the story.
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Massachussets Establishes Council, Worker Registry for
Consumer-Directed Care
A new Massachusetts council aims to help consumers who supervise
their own personal care attendants (PCAs) to access good care by
creating a more stable PCA workforce. The Personal Care Attendant
Quality Workforce Council will be made up of seniors, people with
disabilities and their family members, and PCA advocates. It will
help set wages and benefits, establish a worker registry to help
consumers find PCAs, and provide training. Consumers will still be in
charge of choosing, hiring, and firing their PCAs, who will have the
right to form a union.
The legislation was backed by 1199SEIU and endorsed by over a
hundred organizations, including many senior and disability providers
and advocacy groups. The Massachusetts legislature voted for it
unanimously on July 24.
Click
here
for the rest of the story.
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New Website Focuses on Supporting Pennsylvania's Direct-Care Workers
A new website from Better
Jobs Better Care-Pennsylvania houses information about how to support
Pennsylvania's direct-care workers.
The site links to publications of interest, summarizes pending
legislation and trends affecting direct-care workers, and lists
upcoming trainings and conferences. Separate sections address
direct-care workers and long-term care providers.
Users can access back issues of Frontline Care, a free
quarterly newsletter produced by members of BJBC-PA's worker advisory
group. They can also subscribe to the newsletter or sign up for
regular e-mail updates.
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Study Seeks Direct-Care Workers of Color
The Oregon Center for Applied Science is looking for CNAs, NAs and
orderlies of color who occasionally work with patients or residents
with psychiatric care needs to participate in a survey. To fill out
the online survey, which takes approximately 20 minutes, participants
will be paid $30. The deadline for participating is September 1.
Click
here for more
information or to participate.
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Why Michigan Can't Afford Not to Give Home Care Workers a Raise
We often hear about why states can't afford to increase direct-care
worker wages, but a new report implies that they may not be able to
afford not to - at least in their home care programs.
According to
Costs and Benefits of a Wage Increase for Home Help Workers,
the raise included in Michigan's fiscal year 2007 Department of
Community Health budget will reduce state Medicaid costs by $276
million over the next six years. The budget establishes a minimum
wage of $7 an hour for workers in the state's Medicaid-funded Home
Help program, up from the current $6.07 per hour.
The authors hypothesize that raising wages will reduce turnover
and improve care, attracting more clients to the program - and thus
reducing the need for more expensive nursing home care. They also
project that lower turnover will lower administrative costs, as state
caseworkers will spend less time processing new caregivers into the
system.
They estimate cost efficiencies of $25 million in the next fiscal
year (FY '07), despite the $30 million that will be spent to increase
wages. They expect that amount to go up each year for a time, as more
people choose home care over nursing facilities, reaching $70 million
in 2012.
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Higher Staffing Levels May be Key to Better Care in Non-Profit
Nursing Homes
In this year's annual look at nursing home quality,
Consumer Reports
found that nonprofit homes generally provide significantly better
care than for-profits. The magazine, which analyzed the results of
state inspections for about 16,000 homes nationwide, also found that
independents tend to provide better care than homes that were part of
a chain. The authors concluded that staffing was probably part of the
reason.
"One reason the independently owned, not-for-profit facilities
might do a better job is that they tend to have more staff, which
experts agree is crucial to good care," said one article in the
nursing home package. "We found that on average, not-for-profits
provided almost an hour of additional nursing care each day per
resident, compared with for-profit facilities."
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CBS Looks at the High Price Workers Pay for $3-a-Gallon Gas
The difficulty many home care workers are experiencing of paying for
gas at today's prices was highlighted on the July 28 episode of the
CBS Evening News.
Michele Reed, a 46-year-old home care provider in Los Angeles,
was one of the people featured in a story on the heavy burden placed
upon low-wage workers and working families by the rising cost of
gasoline. According to a news release from SEIU, of which Reed is a
member, a camera crew and interview team followed her for two days
"while she drove and ran errands, picked up prescription medicine,
brought her consumers to medical appointments, and purchased
groceries for them."
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Provider Offers Advice on Hiring a Home Health Aide
In an
essay
for the Portland Press Herald, home health provider Joan
Donahue, R.N., responded to a local story about a caregiver suspected
of murdering an elderly woman by offering advice on how to hire a
home care aide.
"We must pay attention to the risks of untrained, unprofessional
people hiring themselves out as 'caregivers,'" wrote Donahue in her
July 4 essay. "We wouldn't hire anybody off the street to fix a
leaking roof, invest our money, represent us in court or even install
our cable TV. We would search for a qualified professional for each
of these activities. However, elders, their families, and even their
financial trust officers are at a loss when it comes to hiring
somebody to provide emotional, social and physical care for
themselves or an elderly loved one who lives alone at home."
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September 11, 2006
ASA East Coast August Series on Aging, Philadelphia, PA
September 24, 2006
ASA West Coast Autumn Series on Aging, San Francisco, CA
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