CLOSE MENU
The work of home care aides, who provide care to older and disabled individuals in their homes, contributes immensely to the health of our society, and yet this work is vastly undervalued. The job also involves many hazards and sources of stress.
While news coverage of aides’ efforts on the frontlines during the pandemic has brought slightly more attention to this important workforce, this coverage rarely examines the role of the home care agencies in supporting aides and improving their working conditions.
In a new article in the Journal of Applied Gerontology, Associate Professor Emma Tsui and collaborators explore how home care agencies address one critical stressor for aides: client death.
Despite aides’ frequent voicing of the emotional and financial stress of client death in research studies, Tsui and her colleagues found that agencies engaged primarily in a range of informal, reactive practices related to client death, with relatively few targeted and proactive efforts to support aides.
While agency leaders generally acknowledged a need for greater aide support, they pointed to a lack of sustainable home care financing and policy resources to fund this.
“We were impressed by how motivated most of the agency leaders in our study were to better support aides around client death, and yet they also felt so constrained by the way we as a society fund this labor,” said Tsui.
In light of this, the researchers recommend increased funding to support wages, paid time off, and a range of supportive services.
