Written by: Amanda Angulo
The baby boomer generation is aging, resulting in a higher demand for home health aides at care facilities for the elderly. Currently, there are 54 million Americans at the age of 65 or older. This number is expected to rise to 96 million by 2060.
Due to this expected rise, home health aides have more job openings within the next decade than for any other job position or occupation. However, how can we be sure that people will even apply and fill the much-needed positions?
The director of Policy Research at PHI, a national nonprofit organization advocating for home health aides, Kezia Scales, claims that the jobs are exhausting, pay low wages, show little respect, and encourage almost no career growth. “And so 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,” she stated.
Scales had been a long-time proposer to improving the work with training, better wanted, and support for the aides. A possible bill that was proposed could do that. $400 billion of federal money has been proposed to go into the nation’s “care economy” in the next eight years. This extends and expands Medicare programs, access to care for seniors and people with disabilities, improve wages, working conditions, etc.
Author of the book, Who Will Care For Us?, Paul Osterman claims that home health aides are also restricted in their work. For example, they can only remind their patient to take their medication but cannot give it to them. Therefore, Osterman calls for an expansion of their duties and for better training which can help prevent keeping their patients out of hospitals.
“That would also save money and, to some extent, take over some of the work from much higher paid nurses. So that would then create savings, which could then be used in part to pay for the higher wages,” Osterman said.
Photo from: AARP
