Addressing the Direct Care Workforce Shortage
Through research, interviews with stakeholders and federal policy experts, and a private roundtable discussion, BPC identified key challenges to expanding the direct care workforce and federal policy reforms to address those challenges.
Specifically, three major challenges were identified to recruiting and retaining direct care workers:
Specifically, three major challenges were identified to recruiting and retaining direct care workers:
- Work environments that do not effectively support workers’ needs and contribute to feeling undervalued, largely due to inadequate and stagnant wages and benefits, limited access to training, and a lack of career lattices for professional advancement;
- Domestic workforce programs that predominantly target more medicalized or credentialed professions and an immigration system that is not structured to ensure adequate visa and green card pathways exist for foreign-born workers who desire to help fill unmet demand for direct care workers; and
- The absence of standardized data collection and publicly available data on the volume, stability, compensation, and profile of the direct care workforce to better measure the effects of federal policy reforms to expand the workforce and inform evidence-based.
