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Home care aides play a critical role in the care of older adults, but they do this under difficult working conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated aides’ stress and worsened their mental health, raising the question of how agencies can better support aides.
A new study explores how home care industry leaders in New York perceived and addressed home care aides’ mental health and well-being prior to and during the pandemic through in-depth interviews conducted in 2019 (n = 8 agencies) and 2022 (n = 14 agencies). Researchers found that these topics became more central in leaders’ thinking, reflected in a range of new internally and externally funded agency actions, albeit limited by ongoing financial constraints. Maintaining a skilled and reliable aide workforce is critical to societal health but will remain challenging without continued investment in aide support of the kind described in the Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being.
“Home care aides are a rapidly growing workforce and play such an important and underrecognized role in societal health, particularly for older adults, disabled individuals, and those of us in their care networks,” says first author Emma Tsui. “The moves that some home care agencies have made toward supporting aides’ mental health should be applauded, but we’d also like to see these efforts strengthened and diversified. Unions are key partners and coalitions that allow agencies to work together have already helped to accelerate this work and can continue to do so. We see stronger policies supporting aides (e.g., Fair Pay for Home Care here in New York) and improved funding of home and community-based care as critical next steps.”
