New survey results of the state’s home care workforce reveal that home care agencies, on average, are only able to retain three of the 18 workers typically hired over a three month period.
With funding from the Tufts Health Plan Foundation, the Home Care Aide Council conducted an assessment of the Massachusetts home care aide workforce throughout 2016 and 2017.
This project included both a survey of home care agencies that contract with the Aging Service Access Point (ASAP) network, which took place in the Fall of 2016 and a survey of home care aides employed by these agencies which occurred in the Fall of 2017.
Here are links to the reports from this assessment:
Here are some of the key findings of the agency and home care aide assessments:
Turnover Information:
- Nearly 40% of the aides that responded to our survey indicated that they are likely to leave their home care aide job within the next year
- Home care agencies who completed our study reported a quarterly home care aide turnover rate of 16%
Workforce Supply Issues:
- In the Fall of 2016, over 45% of agencies who responded to our survey were already reporting that they were having difficulty filling cases on both weekdays and weekends
- Nearly 90% of the agencies indicated that recruiting qualified home care aides was their top workforce challenge
Workforce Demographics:
- Over 47% of the home care aides who responded to our survey have at least one other job
- Nearly 50% of our aide respondents were born outside of the US
- The most commonly reported immigrant population was Haitian at 27%
- 40% live in households with an annual income of less than $20,000
- 48.4% were MassHealth recipients