“My passion for working with people with dementia, for making life better for them, has been my major motivating factor. But over time, I keep saying to myself: ‘It’s the direct-care worker, stupid,’” says Joanne Rader. “The only way to make the lives of people with dementia better is to improve the working lives of […]

“Most of the people that get into this work are women, and they have kids,” says Patti Green of her fellow direct-care workers. “A lot of them are single. They need to earn a decent hourly rate of pay, and they need to have health insurance.”
“That would attract more people, and then if they had […]

“There has been a lot of paternalism about direct-care staff – the notion that they are not really adults,” says Anna Ortigara. “People wonder: Are they really capable of being in a lead role? Can they be trusted to make good decisions? Are they capable of self-direction?”
Instead of these questions, Ortigara believes, we should ask […]

“I’ve seen a tremendous change in the view of direct-care workers,” says researcher Barbara J. Bowers. “I don’t think you’ll find a lot of people in long-term care any more who say ‘They’re lazy, they’re incompetent, they don’t know anything.’ I think there’s a tremendous amount of respect.
“The trouble is, managers think it’s their job […]

”There needs to be a real shift in terms of the values of our society, in how we regard the people who give this care,” says Constance L. (Connie) Coogle, Ph.D., of our nation’s direct-care workers. ”How do you get a whole society to have a revolutionary change of values?”
”I think maybe you do it […]