Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute

See schedule odirect care workers provide skilled, hands-on support to older adults and people with disabilities in home, community-based, and residential settings. They ensure clients' wellbeing, lend emotional support, and assist with daily tasks essential to independent living. However, these workers are often denied opportunities for quality training, a living wage, advancement, and respect for their essential role, making it difficult for them to provide the quality care their clients deserve. As a consequence, long-term care providers struggle to recruit and retain enough caring, committed professionals to meet the growing need for these services.drawing on 32 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. To achieve broad geographic impact, phi maintains a national headquarters in new york city and deploys staff from across the country including the tri-state region, California, the midwest, and north carolina. 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 business. In a typical year, phi and chca enroll more than 500 participants in free, four-week home health aide training. Our program is distinguished by its comprehensive, hands-on curriculum; guaranteed job placement; and extensive wraparound retention supports for participants, primarily, women of color facing multiple barriers to employment. These elements lead to strong program outcomes, including 95 percent training completion and 85 percent job placement among trainees, with 85 percent of hires still working 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 (4.5 fte) collaborates with long-term care providers, training entities, 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, grounded in phi's coaching approach to building communications and problem-solving skills.to meet the long-term care sector's growing demand for online training solutions, phi has developed an extensive suite of hybrid and online courses. Over the past fiscal year, this work has included creating 39 online courses for independent caregivers through a partnership with homebridge, a california-based provider of in-home supportive services. These courses have the potential to significantly increase the level of training and support available to over half a million independent caregivers in the state. During the first quarter of 2023, over 2,600 caregivers enrolled in the courses, with 94% rating their training as "excellent or "very good. "phi has also developed the care integration senior aide (cisa) role, a comprehensive model for home care worker advancement. Our cisa curriculum includes training for aides on chronic diseases and management of conditions in the home; communication and problem-solving to ensure effective and respectful delivery of person-centered care; and skills for observing, recording, and reporting on clients' health and wellbeing. The goal is for cisas to achieve full integration with interdisciplinary care teams, and help providers achieve positive health outcomes such as reducing clients' avoidable hospitalizations. In fiscal year 2023, phi continued our multi-year project to implement and evaluate the cisa role at home care agencies in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and successfully applied for a planning grant based on implementing cisa in new york state.research and evaluationin october 2022, phi created a dedicated research & evaluation team (5.5 fte), to focus on building a compelling evidence base on direct care workforce interventions and related state and national policies. In january 2023, we launched the direct care workforce state index, an interactive tool featuring all 50 u.s. states and Washington, dc. The index offers a data-driven picture of states' public policies that impact direct care workers. It also enables users to rank and compare states based on the economic status of direct care workers, as well as the range of policies that states have enacted to support these and other workers. Going forward, the index will inform phi's state-based advocacy priorities and gauge how we move the needle on policies.the research & evaluation team also completed an analysis of training and credentialing standards for direct care workers across nearly all settings and service delivery models/waiver programs in north carolina, yielding the most comprehensive resource on this topic to date. In parallel, phi developed a core competency set, drawing on previous sets and engaging community partners in assessing how these competencies are reflected in existing training programs. In addition, the team maintains phi's national direct care workforce resource center, a curated online library of publications on the direct care workforce and long-term care issues. Finally, research & evaluation produces original research on the direct care workforce, disseminates related reports, and evaluates phi's workforce innovations to inform policy and practice interventions.policy and communicationsphi's policy and communications team (4 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, regional, 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, the policy team completed phase one of phi's multi-state advocacy initiative: essential jobs, essential care. Between 2020 and 2022, phi built coalitions of advocates in Michigan, new mexico, and north carolina achieving concrete policy victories such as wage increases and bonuses for direct care workers, and the implementation of new training and credentialing initiatives. Phi has also expanded the initiative to include Maine, new jersey, and new york. We are now in the second phase of essential jobs, essential care (2023-2026), which involves engaging more states, broadening our advocacy activities, and supporting advocates through a learning collaborative.