Workforce Cabinet Begins Deliberations

Posted: Mar. 21, 2008
return to IFAS Age Newletter March 2008

There's probably not a long-term care provider in the country that hasn't struggled with high turnover or isn't challenged by the difficulties of attracting new employees to the field of aging services. The so-called "workforce crisis" is well-documented and is only expected to get worse as the baby boomers age and the traditional labor pool shrinks.

So how will the nation find qualified people to care for a growing aging population? That question dominated discussions in early December when representatives of a variety of workforce sectors gathered in Washington, D.C. for the first meeting of AAHSA's Workforce and Talent Cabinet. Over the next two years, the cabinet will be exploring a broad range of perspectives as it develops a plan to build a quality long-term care workforce that will meet the needs of providers, workers and residents/clients.

"Our collective hope is that we are going to be able to get the workforce issue on the national agenda," says Cabinet Chair Audrey Weiner, president and CEO of Jewish Home and Hospital Lifecare System in New York. "My expectation is that we will come out with a report that prioritizes short-term, intermediate and long-term issues and presents an action plan for addressing those issues."

Starting with Research

Information gathering will be the first agenda item for the cabinet, which consists of providers, consumers, direct care workers, nurses, medical directors, social workers, government officials, researchers, educators and funders. Weiner says the cabinet will focus its attention on the wide variety of trained individuals who work in the long-term care settings and who may be in short supply in the future. This includes direct care workers and nurses, as well as physicians, social workers, therapists and pharmacists, she says. In addition, the group will explore how workforce issues affect a variety of long-term care settings, including both residential and community-based care options.

"We're not certain at this point what the specific issues are," says Weiner. "So our very first task will be to review the literature as well as all the reports that have been written that sometimes don't fall into the category of literature. Many agencies and organizations have been looking at workforce issues but, up until now, no one has taken all of these pieces from all of those silos to see what's been done, what's been successful and how all this information can be applied to home care, housing and nursing homes."

The cabinet will also be investigating the extent to which core competencies for long-term care exist in a variety of professions; how these competencies are being used in certification, hiring and worker evaluations; what specific skills the competencies address; and how they might be expanded to reflect recent changes in the aging services field.

"People in long-term care are working together in ways that we never imagined," says Weiner, who credits culture change with placing a new emphasis on worker attitudes as well as worker skills. In light of this change, she says, core competencies may need to be expanded to address "the much more amorphous set of attitudes around how one feels about elders, how one feels about working in a collaborative setting and how one feels about sharing job tasks."

Weiner says she hopes the Workforce Cabinet will shine a national spotlight on a problem that can't be solved at the local level.

"Any one of us can nibble around the edges and come up with a little pilot program that may work to improve retention at a particular facility," she says. "But when that program ends, there will still be the same problem that existed before. The workforce challenges we all face represent systemic problems, and that's why AAHSA has to take the leadership to address them."