caregiver mental health Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Why There So few Caregivers to Recruit in Health Care ??????

October 20, 2021

Where did the Caregiver all over the Nation Go?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and 13.7 million workers in roles comparable to direct care lost

their jobs in early 2020, they did not turn to direct care jobs, a recent study found.

Of the 9.1 million who have now found a new job, “an immeasurably small number of workers” entered the direct care workforce, despite high demand for staff, a study by consulting firm PHI and the Health Workforce Research Center on Long-Term Care at the University of California San Francisco found.

Women, the main caregiver are leaving the workforce in record numbers, and it’s not just a result of the pandemic.

The pandemic was the catalyst for millions of women leaving their jobs, but not the root cause. Since 2009, the number of women in the workforce has been decreasing because we haven’t made investments in child care and paid leave. Now the gap between men and women in the workforce is widening, while in most other countries the gap is shrinking. That’s leaving our whole economy vulnerable.

Right now, women’s workforce participation is at 55.9%. The last time it was that low was 1987)

Workforce for Women Caregivers and all Working women with Children Became Nightmare in Pandemic

The pandemic opened many eyes to the realities of child care in America when schools went virtual and many day-care centers closed. Covid-19 forced millions of working parents, especially women, to leave the workforce to care for their children. Following up on a campaign pledge to “make high-quality child care affordable,” President Joe Biden has asked Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars for early childhood care and education.

If You Are a Woman or Work In Aging Call Your Congressman

Care Infrastructure may be dead if folks in health care and older constituents do not contact their congressman and tell them to support this bill. They control the votes for the bill and you have to let them know you will only vote for them if they do. Common Cause has this easy way to find and contact your congressman If you believe in Medicare and senior’s right to not have their teeth rot, not hear their grandkids or be unable to read a book- please do it now

NY Times-The Mushrooming Home Care Aide Crisis

October 8, 2021

Crisis in Homecare Aides NY Times

The New York Times featured a story on the crisis in home care aides on September 25th,2021.The NYT article warned ranks of home care aides are expected to grow by more than those of any other job in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.But It’s also among the lowest paying occupations on the list. Yet in spite of geriatric care managers and homecare’s dependence on these aides ,nearly one in five aides lives below the poverty line. So we have a crisis built on high demand and low supply.

Geriatric Care management depends on home care aides.

Whether a Geriatric Care Manager is placing aides through a partnership with a private duty Home Care agency or employs them by being a Care Managed Home Care Agency- working with elders means 90% of the aging clients will need from 4 to 24 hour care from home care aides.

Home Care Aide Top Job In Growth

The ranks of home care aides are expected to grow by more than those of any other job in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s also among the lowest paying occupations on the list. Yet .in spite of geriatric care managers dependence or these aides ,nearly one in five aides lives below the poverty line.

Seniors Want To Remain at Home

By 2030, 21 percent of the American population will be at the retirement age, up from 15 percent in 2014, and older adults have long been moving away from institutionalized care. According to an AARP survey, three-quarters of Americans age 50 and older

indicated they prefer to remain in their current residence or community for as long as possible as opposed to a senior care facility.The

preference among older adults to remain in familiar homes and communities is termed “aging in place “

Home Care Industry in Dire Straights

In 2019, national spending on home health care reached a high of $113.5 billion, a 40 percent increase from 2013, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

But this growing industry , which Geriatric Care Managers and all aging services critically need to support aging in place or care at home rather than an institution, is in dire trouble.

The pandemic only made things worse. It exposed the vulnerability of not only the

elderly and infirm but also of those who care for them. As Covid-19 spread across the country, many families turned to home health care as an alternative to nursing homes, which had become hot spots for the virus. Shortages of personal protective equipment made the work risky. Many home care aides have not been able to work due to their own underlying conditions, family concerns or general anxiety. This has caused a crisis in the Home Industry, which care managers depend upon for staffing cases. Now with the Biden Mandate of requiring Medicaid and Medicare home care providers to get vaccination, there will be a whole new crisis with care providers under those giant government programs or work in hospitals .

Solutions to the National loss of Home Care Aides

There are many other factors fueling the loss of paid care providers and there are great solutions offered by Leading Age a national non profit for aging and home care.

This includes , expanding training, increasing pay and increasing the caregiver pipeline to include college students, high school students and recent immigrants.

Why are Care Providers for Clients So Hard to Find ?

September 8, 2021

Home care aides all over the US are AWOL. Care Management, home care agencies, nursing homes are severely understaffed and cannot find enough caregivers to staff cases for shifts. Why?

Disorganization of Home Care Industry

Staffing shortages have frustrated the home care and care management industry for

decades, according to Paula Hahn author of the New old Aging blog for the New York Times. . There is no national recruiting or training program for this huge industry.The home care industry has always been a hodgepodge of for-profit companies and chains, nonprofit programs and publicly funded care through Medicaid, all operating under a confusing welter of state and federal regulations, plus an uncharted “gray market” of clients who avoid agencies and hire privately. But Covid-19 has intensified the problem.

“I’ve never heard such frustration over finding workers, and I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” said Vicki Hoak, executive director of the Home Care Association of America, whose 4,000-member agencies collectively employ about 500,000 people.

Bureau of Labor Predicted this in 2020 -Pre-COVID

This was foreseen and was by the Bureau of Labor statistics. They predicted in 2020 that the long-term care sector would need to fill an additional 6.2 million direct care job openings between 2019 and 2029 as workers leave the field for a new occupation or leave the labor force altogether due to retirement, disability, or some other reasons. Combining these departures and new jobs, they projected a 7.4 million total direct care job openings in the decade ahead

Mammoth Growth in # of Seniors Who Want to Age

in Place

The bigger problem is the growing need for home care. Each day 10,000 seniors turn 65

in the US and the number of older adults will more than double over the next several decades to top 88 million people and represent over 20 percent of the population by 2050. . The majority want to age in their home and need home care, where today there are not enough home care workers to fill those jobs.

More $ Spent on Home Care than Nursing Homes

2015, was the first time nationally that more money was spent on home care than nursing home care. We’ve seen a culture and financing shift toward home and community-based care.”
Covid -19 now the Delta variant has wreaked more chaos into the home care market. Home care workers are mainly women and had to stay home with their children when school closed down. They were also hot hard by COVID themselves, working with seniors before a vaccine was developed.

Solutions to the National loss of caregivers

There are many other factors the loss of care providers and great solutions offered by Leading Age a national non profit for aging and home care.

Biden’s Caregiver Infrastructure Plan Crumbling

June 16, 2021

Caregiver Infrastructure Bill in Shreds

President Biden’s caregiver infrastructure bill appears to be in deep trouble . In fact the entire bill in is jeopardy.

The president set his sights on a sweeping infrastructure bill that would both revamp the nation’s roads and bridges as well as boost spending on services including healthcare and child care — though Republicans reject the idea that those latter priorities even qualify for the label “infrastructure.

Republicans Do Not see Care As Infrastructure

Many Republicans question government funding for care of the elderly and children, especially at the levels Biden wants. He initially proposed $400 billion for elderly and disabled care, and another $200 billion for childcare. Republicans want this entire Caregiver infrastructure section removed from the bill.

Congressional leaders have a math problem to pass the bill. To get through the evenly split Senate under the normal process, legislation would need support from all of the Democratic caucus and at least 10 Republicans — or more if any Democrats defect. If Democrats try to approve legislation on their own using budget reconciliation, they cannot lose a single vote.

What Will Biden’s Investment Create- in Jobs and the Economy

What are these lawmakers questioning? Basically the women who hold up half the sky of care in the United States by doing it through their low paid or no paid jobs. Like American bridges these

caregivers are collapsing.

Sixty-five percent of the jobs — approximately 1.5 million jobs —resulting from Biden’s investment would be in child care, residential care, and home health care. An additional 225,000 jobs can be created or supported in sectors that support care work, and over 500,000 jobs would be supported in other sectors as direct care workers spend their wages on goods and services.

Biden’s Plan of investing $77.5 billion per year would support over two million new jobs, at an average cost of $34,496 per supported job. Over 10 years, this translates to 22.5 million new jobs. Annually, a $77.5 billion investment in new jobs translates into $220 billion in new economic activity.

If Aging is Your Field Call You Representative Now

So find your local representative and tell them to support Biden’s bill if you care about aging or caregivers or women or shoring up the frayed- fraught care infrastructure.I have done a series of blogs on the bill . Check them out now

Is Biden’s Caregiver Bill Really Infrastructure?

May 11, 2021

House Republicans Denounce Biden Caregiver Infrastructure Plan -Say It Is Not Infrastructure.

House Democrats defended President Joe Biden’s inclusion in his “American Jobs Plan” of $400 billion in support for caregiving, after Republicans criticized the package as stretching the definition of infrastructure and called on the White House to scale it back.

WHY CALL It INFRASTRUCTURE

The word “infrastructure” means something solid, essential, distributed and in the public interest. But as we have all learned in the pandemic year, care infrastructure is just that: UNPAID OR LOW PAID Caregivers are “rocks” and the solid foundation upon which the economy works. Without it, our families, our paychecks, our labor force participation, our workplaces all decline and we all suffer and collectively fall behind.

Like sagging bridges , unpaid women caregivers hold up the care infractstruce. In 2017, AARP found that about 41 million family caregivers in America perform roughly $470 billion worth of unpaid labor a year. Since then, the number of caregivers has increased to 53 million, meaning that more than one out of five Americans are unpaid caregivers, according to AARP’s latest report.

The Care Infrastructure Collapsing

From February 2020 to January 2021 more than 2.3 million left their jobs, and that puts women’s labor force participation rate at 57%, the lowest it’s been since 1988. This was due to a lack of childcare and closing of schools due to COVID when 39% of women family caregivers leave their job to have more time to care for a loved one.

Caregiving for an elder reduces paid work hours for middle aged women by about 41 percent. In total, the cost impact of caregiving on the individual female caregiver in terms of lost wages and Social Security benefits equals $324,044. 34% leave because their work does not provide flexible hours.

HOW MUCH WOULD IT COST GOVERNMENT IF FREE CAREGIVERS QUIT

Let’s put that free caregiving into context.At $470 billion in 2013, the value of unpaid caregiving exceeded the value of paid home care and total Medicaid spending in the same year, and nearly matched the value of the sales of the world’s largest company, Wall-Mart ($477 billion). [AARP Public Policy Institute. (2015). Valuing the Invaluable: 2015 Update.]

So in 2013 the US Government would have to come up with $477 billion to replace free caregiving.

Let’s put that free caregiving into 2017 context. AARP notes unpaid caregivers’ economic impact was more than all out-of-pocket spending on U.S. health care in 2017($470 billion)and the total combined value added to the U.S. economy by the agriculture/forestry and mining sectors ($438 billion) that year.

So caregiving was not free, the US would have to come up with $477 billion in 2017 to replace it.

WHAT IF UNPAID CAREGIVERS Totally COLLAPSED

If all these unpaid family caregivers stopped caring the national caregiving system would collapse, like dangerous American bridges .Then the US government would have to come up with $470 Billion to replace free caregivers or put all elderly in nursing homes , which are havens for disease spread , which we know from the pandemic making them a holocaust of death. Congregate nursing homes and have become a broken national system since COVID.

So Biden has brilliantly found a way to avoid the $470,00 billion bill and instead create jobs that will keep elders at home cared for through home health care paid through Medicare.