New from PHI’s National Clearinghouse

The newest additions to the PHI National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce:

Path Toward Economic Resilience for Family Caregivers: Mitigating Household Deprivation and the Health Care Talent Shortage at the Same Time — This article, posted to the website of the Gerontologist on April 30, argues that family caregivers’ skills are not being used to their fullest extent in the health care market. The authors propose a “path toward economic resilience,” which would allow family caregivers to make use of their skills in the field of health care by taking jobs such as certified nursing assistants. The “path toward economic resilience” would improve caregivers’ own personal financial standing while increasing quality of care generally throughout the country, the authors write.

Medically Complex Home Care and Caregiver Strain — This research article examines the correlation between the strain experienced by caregivers — family members, friends, and home health aides — and the complexity of care tasks they provided. The researchers found that caregivers who provide highly or moderately complex “nursing care” — for example, operating a ventilator or tending to pressure sores — were the most strained, followed by those providing relatively simple nursing care. Caregivers who provided only personal care — i.e. no nursing care at all — were significantly less likely to experience strain. The study, published in the May issue of the Gerontologist, used data from the Cash and Counseling Demonstration and Evaluation study conducted in Arkansas, Florida, and New Jersey.

Green House: Flexible, Low-Cost Funding Available — Green House Project senior director David Farrell writes that many nursing home providers would like to make their facilities more person-centered, but lack the money to do so. Farrell describes the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation‘s efforts to provide financial assistance to these cash-strapped nursing homes — as long as they serve populations that are at least two-fifths Medicaid — in order to help them upgrade to Green House facilities. The article, published in the June issue of Provider, also cites several ways Green Houses better serve consumers, including the use of consistent assignment and self-managed work teams.

The PHI National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce is a national online library for people in search of solutions to the direct-care staffing crisis in long-term care. It houses over 1,000 articles, reports, issue briefs, and fact sheets on the direct-care workforce.