Many Americans hope to spend their remaining days at home, rather than moving into a care facility. When the time comes, they rely on the over two million home health aides who provide day-to-day support.
And here is an additional hard and true fact: According to NPR.org, there are currently close to 54 million Americans age 65 and older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and that number is expected to rise to 95 million by 2060 – making it increasingly difficult to get help.
In fact, within the next decade, there are more projected openings for home health aides than any other occupation. One study estimates that 70 percent of adults age 65 and older are expected to need some form of basic assistance.
I happened to see a story in the Tampa Bay Times today that bemoaned the shortage of home health aides in Florida. Apparently, it took 23 phone calls to find home health care for MJ Falango’s father, who was in the hospital. His doctor would only discharge him if he had a home health aide available.
At first, Falango, who lived 90 miles away in Deland, wanted a vaccinated home health aide for her father, contacting national agencies and local companies with her request.
“Several times, people laughed,” she recalled. “They said, ‘We have too few employees as it is — if we make that a condition of employment we wouldn’t have anybody.’” She even lowered her standards, but it still made no difference. She waited for over three weeks.
But here’s the kicker – A local agency in Melbourne had an aide to care for her father, and 87-year-old Joseph Falango returned home from the hospital. The home health employee was a no-show on her first and second days of work. The aide claimed one of her children had gotten COVID-19.
The shortage of home caregivers is not Florida’s problem alone
According to the October Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health Tracking Poll, about one in five adults in the U.S. say they receive ongoing support for daily activities such as bathing, dressing, or remembering medications. Imagine – 20 percent out of a population of over 330 million people?
Yet, in quite a number of states, including New York, Virginia, and Washington DC, among others, home health aides or caregivers are in very short supply. The most obvious reason for the shortage is the coronavirus pandemic, but that is only a small part of the problem.
The real problem is something that has been going on for a long time in this country. Let’s be honest – Home health aide work is challenging; it’s exhausting work, with low pay, often no benefits, and little respect and is overwhelmingly done by women of color and a dwindling number of immigrants.
Kezia Scales is the director of Policy Research at PHI, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for home health aides. She says, “We end up having a fairly unstable workforce with high levels of turnover and job vacancies, not because people don’t want to do this work, but because they can’t afford to do this work.”
For years, advocates like Scales have been calling for changes in training, wages, and supports for home health aides. She says, “We don’t need tweaks to the system, we need a complete transformation.”
President Joe Biden wants to increase the number of home healthcare workers through an infusion of $400 billion into home- and community-based care for the elderly and people with disabilities over the next eight years, close to doubling what’s being spent now.
The president’s goal of “creating new and better jobs” will mean overhauling the current system of training, which is disorganized and overpriced and blocks home health aides from advancing to the next level, according to Matt Sigelman, CEO of Emsi Burning Glass, a labor analytics firm.
