‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,’ said one woman who has relied on home health aides for 17 years.
As the old adage goes: It’s hard to find good help.
But some consumers trying to hire a home health-care aide say it has become “nearly impossible” as an expected rise in demand coupled with a broader labor shortage brought on by generous unemployment benefits have converged to create an increasingly shallow pool of potential hires.
For nearly 20 years, 44-year-old Lisa Panzica has hired aides to help her with daily living tasks made difficult by her spinal muscular atrophy, including dressing, transferring, and showering.
She told National Review in a recent interview that while it has always been a difficult process to recruit aides, since summer 2020 it has been “an extreme challenge to find anyone who’s looking for work” near her home on Long Island in New York.
She has spent hours posting and scouring social media, Craigslist, and local apps but says the number of aides looking for work is “minimal.”
A study by the City University of New York in March found that, on average, 17 percent of home-care positions are left unfilled due to staff shortages. The sector is one of the fastest-growing and largest workforces due to the demand created by an aging population.
Ruth Milkman, a professor at The Graduate Center at CUNY and co-author of the aforementioned report, told Home Health Care News earlier this year that a “tremendous shortage” of aides has begun to have an impact on consumers’ ability to receive care.
The number of caregiver positions is expected to surge from 440,000 in 2018 to over 700,000 by 2028. In New York alone, providers will need to recruit an average of 26,510 new aides each year just to keep up with the growing demand. Providers will also need to recruit an additional 71,680 workers annually to replace the caregivers who leave these jobs.
The pre-existing home health shortage has been compounded by generous federal unemployment benefits that have created an environment where working as a home health aide for minimal pay — the median hourly income for a caregiver in New York State is $13.80 — is hardly desirable.
As the $300-per-week unemployment bonus, once placed in effect to incentivize Americans to stay home to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, has lingered long after other pandemic-related measures, a labor shortage has begun to impact numerous sectors of the economy, as National Review has previously reported.
To combat the labor shortfall, at least 26 states have so far announced they will cut off federal unemployment programs ahead of the September 6 expiration.
After the Labor Department released its May jobs report, Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that the “rate at which adults are participating in the workforce has been flat since last summer.”
“This is a significant issue. Workers are not coming back,” he said in a tweet.
However, in an industry like the home health-care industry where supply was already set to outpace demand, the shortage has been devastating.
In a Facebook group for people looking to hire aides through the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) — a program that allows those who need in-home assistance to hire their own aides who are paid through a fiscal intermediary, Panzica says those looking for aides in the group are like “sharks attacking in a tank.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” she said.
She said help-wanted postings in the group have essentially turned into advertisements, with everyone trying to prove they are the easiest case for an aide to work.
“It’s been a challenge forever and I’ve had my feelings towards hiring and I’ve gone through a lot of experiences with people that were not reliable or people that I interviewed and never called me back or people that said they were taking the job and then not taking the job or people that never show up for interviews,” Panzica said.
“Now, it’s worse than ever.”
She typically has five or six aides to cover all of the shifts she needs but lately trying to recruit has been “close to impossible.”
She considered leaving CDPAP in favor of an agency that would send its own aides, but found that years ago when she used an agency the aides they sent “were not trained, they didn’t know how to handle case by case” and they “hardly even knew how to transfer a patient.”
“So it was very, very dangerous to have, for me anyway, when I went that route years ago. So I have been holding off on that. And I’m just trying to make the CDPAP work. But it literally is a second job. It’s a full-time job,” she said.
Panzica is not alone. Many in the group have expressed frustration that hiring aides feels like a full-time job.
Danielle D’Ancona lives in New Hampshire but spends a significant amount of time coordinating care for her mother who lives on Long Island. She said since November 2020, she has struggled to hire a new aide for her mother who is bed-bound and requires 24-hour care.
“With COVID and the unemployment — nobody wants to work because they’re making more on unemployment,” she said. “So, it’s been very difficult finding people.”
D’Ancona says the few people who have reached out and inquired about her job postings have all vanished once she revealed her fiscal intermediary pays $15-per-hour on the books and not private pay.
“I personally don’t think they get paid enough money to do what they do. I also understand that there are some people that need the extra help on unemployment,” she said, “But, if there’s work out there, that’s what gets to me.”
She has tried the Facebook group, Care.com, and word of mouth. Only two people have responded to her Care.com posting that has been up for months.
“Once they hear the pay and, you know, they’re getting more on unemployment nobody wants to do it,” she said. “It’s so frustrating because seeing my mother in the condition that she’s in — the elderly shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“You know, people want to make more money but I don’t think being on unemployment is the way to go. When there’s job opportunities out there.”
However, a new report by the Wall Street Journal shows the number of unemployment-benefit recipients is falling at a quicker pace in Missouri and 21 other states canceling enhanced and extended payments last month. The report suggests that ending the enhanced aid could encourage more people to take jobs.