Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute

See schedule odrawing on over 33 years of experience, phi promotes the interventions needed to ensure that direct care work is quality work such as improved training, family-sustaining wages, and meaningful career paths. Through policy development, advocacy, research, and workforce innovations, we drive systemic change to strengthen the direct care workforce and the long-term care sector as a whole. Direct care workers provide skilled, hands-on support to older adults and people with disabilities in home, community-based, and residential settings. They ensure clients' well-being, provide social and emotional support, and assist with daily tasks essential to independent living. However, these workers often struggle with poor job quality; consequently, long-term care providers find it difficult to recruit and retain enough professionals to meet the growing demand for these services.phi offers providers, payers, and policymakers the tools to transform the long-term care system. Our policy work is informed by our on-the-ground training initiatives and vice versa, enabling us to advance effective solutions that comprehensively improve the quality of direct care jobs. To achieve broad geographic impact, phi maintains a national headquarters in new york city and deploys staff from across the country.training and workforce development programphi co-manages a training and workforce development program in new york city with cooperative home care associates (chca), a licensed home care agency and the country's largest worker-owned cooperative. Phi and chca provide a free home health aide training program, distinguished by its comprehensive, hands-on curriculum; guaranteed job placement; and extensive wraparound retention supports for participants - primarily women of color who face multiple barriers to employment. The program is offered in both english and spanish and exceeds the combined 75 hours of training required by federal and state regulations. These elements lead to strong program outcomes; in fiscal year 2024, participants achieved a 95 percent graduation rate, 85 percent of graduates were placed in quality jobs, and 90 percent of hires were retained after 90 days. Phi builds from the operation of this program to bring best practices in recruitment, training, and workforce development to long-term care employers, educators, and health care systems across the country. Workforce innovations programphi's workforce innovations team (5.5 fte) collaborates with long-term care providers, training entities, state agencies, and academic partners throughout the country to develop, implement, and support entry-level training, upskilling, and advanced roles in direct care. We also engage in organizational development with providers through phi's coaching approach program, which embeds communication and problem-solving skills across staff.to optimize the coaching approach program's accessibility, functionality, and content, phi infused principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion and trauma-informed facilitation throughout the curricula and transitioned components of the program into online and asynchronous formats. This enabled phi to deliver highly relevant, in-demand training for diverse learning audiences at a scale not previously achieved; we introduced the phi coaching approach program to over 1,400 consumer direct care network staff nationwide and offered recurring online, instructor-led phi coaching supervision courses to individual learners across the country. Phi, in collaboration with Florida state university, also pilot tested our partnering to improve care asynchronous training course, which bolsters the relationship between direct care workers and family caregivers to reduce caregiver stress and benefit those who rely on their care. We trained 189 participants, and our evaluation indicated significant learning gains. Phi also continued to implement and evaluate our care integration senior aide (cisa) role, which provides aides with a stronger role in improving care coordination and client social determinants of health, while offering them meaningful career advancement and higher compensation. With advanced training, cisas make visits to consumer homes to support care delivery and coordination and share their observations with the interdisciplinary care teamwhere they have a stronger and more established role. Phi continued our multi-year project to implement and evaluate the cisa role with home care agencies in Wisconsin. We also received funding to plan for a new york-based multi-intervention demonstration, anchored in the cisa role, which is slated to launch in 2025.research and evaluation programphi's research & evaluation team (6 fte) builds the evidence base on state and national policies and workforce interventions that improve direct care jobs and strengthen long-term care. We conduct original research, regularly analyze workforce and consumer data, release policy publications, and evaluate phi's own field-learning interventions. The team maintains phi's online workforce data center, which provides the latest state and national data on the direct care workforce from employment statistics and projections to earnings and demographics. We also maintain phi's direct care workforce state index, an interactive online tool featuring all 50 u.s. states and Washington, dc, which enables users to rank and compare states based on the economic status of direct care workers and the range of policies that states have enacted to support them. In 2024, we published a comprehensive report on the state index, detailing key findings and recommendations for policy and practice interventions.annually, we produce the report, direct care workers in the united states: key facts, which provides extensive direct care workforce data, including its demographics, occupational roles, job quality challenges, and projected job openings. In september 2023, we released a report, bridging the gap: enhancing support for immigrant direct care workers, which discusses the crucial role that immigrant workers play in long-term care delivery, details immigrant direct care worker data, and offers federal-level policy recommendations to better support these workers and improve the long-term care sector.policy programphi's policy team (2 fte) supports policymakers and advocates in crafting evidence-based policies to advance quality care and quality jobs. Our capacity includes policy and labor market analysis and state and national policy expertise. This expertise, and our related public education campaigns, have established phi as the nation's primary source of information and analysis on direct care, anchored at www.phinational.org and @phinational.over the past fiscal year, we launched the together in care initiative, which strengthens the vital relationship between direct care workers and family caregivers to reduce caregiver stress and improve the outcomes of those who rely on their care. In june 2024, we released a policy brief outlining a range of recommendations - such as matching service registries, care team integration, research, and workforce interventions - that can elevate the relationship between these caregivers to create a more sustainable long-term care system. The policy team also entered phase two of phi's multi-state advocacy initiative: essential jobs, essential care, which builds coalitions of advocates to achieve concrete policy victories for direct care workers. Moving forward, phi's engagement with these coalitions will focus largely on promoting universal direct care workforce training and credentialing standards to drive systemic improvements to long-term care. Universal worker standards are based on the competencies required to provide quality care to today's long-term care clients and promote portable credentialing across settings, roles, and geographies to strengthen the direct care workforce. A universal worker framework also codifies stackable credentialing to maximize the contributions of workers and promote career ladders, economic mobility, recruitment, and retention.