Social Work Study to Focus on Home Health Care Worker Labor Pool Shrinkage
Contact: Sandy Butler, 581-2382; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — Home care workers provide a critical service helping Maine’s elders stay in their homes when they need extra personal care, but the labor pool serving that expanding population is shrinking at a time when it should be growing.
Sandy Butler, professor of social work and coordinator of the UMaine Master’s in Social Work program, has begun a 3-year student research project to find out why.
“This is a growing job category and there are too few people to fill it,” Butler says. “It is not an appealing job for a lot of people. But it is very important work. We need to look to increase the numbers.”
Personal support specialists and personal care attendants — classified as direct care or home care workers — provide in-home assistance for frail elders and individuals with disabilities. The work can include bathing, dressing, feeding, assistance with transportation and light housework. Butler notes that they usually work for very low wages, often without benefits and under difficult working conditions.
Butler has received a $123,000 Academic Research Enhancement Award from the National Institute on Aging for the study. She plans to survey 250 home care workers in Maine to investigate factors influencing job turnover and retention, and more specifically, how those factors differ between older and younger workers.
Butler will oversee the study, to be carried out largely by two social work students and a nursing student, beginning this month.
“The students will be involved in all aspects of data collection and analysis. We hope to find information that will be of help to the agencies,” she says.
The study explores two areas of interest to Butler, a nationally recognized gerontologist and elder-care researcher: the financial security of women throughout their lives, and the health and well-being of elders.
Butler conducted a pilot study to justify the grant and further research. The home care field is populated primarily by women between the ages of 25 and 55, and has about a 50 percent turnover rate, even though it also is the fourth fastest-growing occupation in the country, according to Butler. This 18-month longitudinal study will look specifically at home care workers employed by agencies in Maine.
“We’ll look at job satisfaction and burnout, and over a year and a half, we’ll track employees to see if they stayed or left their current jobs, and find out why they made the choices they made,” says Butler, who also wants to examine differences in job experiences between younger and older workers. The industry may need to depend even more on workers over age 55 as employee demographics change, she adds.
Butler says that one obvious issue facing home care workers is the low pay, which is caused in part by low Medicaid reimbursement levels the state pays to the agencies that hire and manage the workers. Another reason for low pay in the field is that it is populated mostly by women, whose wages statistically are lower than what males are paid in most fields, Butler says.
“At the state level, efforts are being made to raise reimbursement levels and also to get health care for these employees,” Butler says. “There is a growing awareness that we need to take better care of the direct care workers in the long-term care system,” which includes home care, assisted living and nursing homes.
In spite of the low pay, Butler says her pilot study on older home care workers also found that the work is appealing for many reasons, including the important relationships that workers develop with their clients.
“My hope is the surveys will help lead us to know better how we can retain home care workers and decrease their burnout, and in particular how we can recruit and retain workers over the age of 55,” says Butler. “Ultimately, the hope is that this will increase the quality of care for elders.”