The Caring Class

The Caring Class PDF Author: Richard Schweid
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501754122
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
The number of elderly and disabled Americans in need of home health care is increasing annually, even as the pool of people—almost always women—willing to do this job gets smaller and smaller. The Caring Class takes readers inside the reality of home health care by following the lives of women training and working as home health aides in the South Bronx. Richard Schweid examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die. By improving the job of home health aide, Schweid shows, we can reduce income inequality and create a pool of qualified, competent home health care providers who would contribute to the well-being of us all. The Caring Class also serves as a guide into the world of our home health care system. Nearly 50 million US families look after an elderly or disabled loved one. This book explains the issues and choices they face. Schweid explores the narratives, histories, and people behind home health care in the United States, examining how we might improve the lives of both those who receive care and those who provide it.

The Caring Class

The Caring Class PDF Author: Richard Schweid
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501754122
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
The number of elderly and disabled Americans in need of home health care is increasing annually, even as the pool of people—almost always women—willing to do this job gets smaller and smaller. The Caring Class takes readers inside the reality of home health care by following the lives of women training and working as home health aides in the South Bronx. Richard Schweid examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die. By improving the job of home health aide, Schweid shows, we can reduce income inequality and create a pool of qualified, competent home health care providers who would contribute to the well-being of us all. The Caring Class also serves as a guide into the world of our home health care system. Nearly 50 million US families look after an elderly or disabled loved one. This book explains the issues and choices they face. Schweid explores the narratives, histories, and people behind home health care in the United States, examining how we might improve the lives of both those who receive care and those who provide it.

Conquering the Crisis

Conquering the Crisis PDF Author: Stephen Tweed
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999061206
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
It's official: there's a crisis in home health care. The crisis? There aren't enough caregivers This is already a recognized industry problem, but it's likely only to get worse. This is a point in history, after all, when about 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 every day--and more of them are needing health care. What do we do? Stephen Tweed is a foremost expert on the home health industry's caregiver recruiting and retention crisis. He shares his insight and solutions in Conquering the Crisis--so that anyone reading it may find themselves doing just that.

Who Will Care For Us?

Who Will Care For Us? PDF Author: Paul Osterman
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448677
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
The number of elderly and disabled adults who require assistance with day-to-day activities is expected to double over the next twenty-five years. As a result, direct care workers such as home care aides and certified nursing assistants (CNAs) will become essential to many more families. Yet these workers tend to be low-paid, poorly trained, and receive little respect. Is such a workforce capable of addressing the needs of our aging population? In Who Will Care for Us? economist Paul Osterman assesses the challenges facing the long-term care industry. He presents an innovative policy agenda that reconceives direct care workers’ work roles and would improve both the quality of their jobs and the quality of elder care. Using national surveys, administrative data, and nearly 120 original interviews with workers, employers, advocates, and policymakers, Osterman finds that direct care workers are marginalized and often invisible in the health care system. While doctors and families alike agree that good home care aides and CNAs are crucial to the well-being of their patients, the workers report poverty-level wages, erratic schedules, exclusion from care teams, and frequent incidences of physical injury on the job. Direct care workers are also highly constrained by policies that specify what they are allowed to do on the job, and in some states are even prevented from simple tasks such as administering eye drops. Osterman concludes that broadening the scope of care workers’ duties will simultaneously boost the quality of care for patients and lead to better jobs and higher wages. He proposes integrating home care aides and CNAs into larger medical teams and training them as “health coaches” who educate patients on concerns such as managing chronic conditions and transitioning out of hospitals. Osterman shows that restructuring direct care workers’ jobs, and providing the appropriate training, could lower health spending in the long term by reducing unnecessary emergency room and hospital visits, limiting the use of nursing homes, and lowering the rate of turnover among care workers. As the Baby Boom generation ages, Who Will Care for Us? demonstrates the importance of restructuring the long-term care industry and establishing a new relationship between direct care workers, patients, and the medical system.

The Crisis of US Hospice Care

The Crisis of US Hospice Care PDF Author: Harold Braswell
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421429829
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring the failure of hospice in America to care for patients and families at the end of life. Hospice is the dominant form of end-of-life care in the United States. But while the US hospice system provides many forms of treatment that are beneficial to dying people and their families, it does not encompass what is commonly referred to as long-term care, which includes help with the activities of daily living: feeding, bathing, general safety, and routine hygienic maintenance. Frequently, such care is carried out by an informal network of unpaid caregivers, such as the person's family or loved ones, who are often ill-prepared to offer this type of support. In The Crisis of US Hospice Care, Harold Braswell argues that the stress of providing long-term care typically overwhelms family members and that overdependence on familial caregiving constitutes a crisis of US hospice care that limits the freedom of dying people. Arguing for the need to focus on the time just before death, Braswell examines how the relationship of hospice to familial caregiving evolved. He traces the history of hospice over the past fifty years and describes the choice that people dying with inadequate familial support face between a neglectful home environment and an impersonal nursing home. A nuanced look at the personal and political dimensions that shape long-term, end-of-life care, this historical and ethnographic study demonstrates that the crisis in US hospice care can be alleviated only by establishing the centrality of hospice to American freedom. Providing a model for the transformative work that is required going forward, The Crisis of US Hospice Care illustrates the potential of hospice for facilitating a new way of living our last days and for having the best death possible.

Patient Safety and Quality

Patient Safety and Quality PDF Author: Ronda Hughes
Publisher: Department of Health and Human Services
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

The Future of the Nursing Workforce in the United States

The Future of the Nursing Workforce in the United States PDF Author: Peter Buerhaus
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Publishers
ISBN: 0763756849
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Future of the Nursing Workforce in the United States: Data, Trends and Implications provides a timely, comprehensive, and integrated body of data supported by rich discussion of the forces shaping the nursing workforce in the US. Using plain, jargon free language, the book identifies and describes the key changes in the current nursing workforce and provide insights about what is likely to develop in the future. The Future of the Nursing Workforce offers an in-depth discussion of specific policy options to help employers, educators, and policymakers design and implement actions aimed at strengthening the current and future RN workforce. The only book of its kind, this renowned author team presents extensive data, exhibits and tables on the nurse labor market, how the composition of the workforce is evolving, changes occurring in the work environment where nurses practice their profession, and on the publics opinion of the nursing profession.

Human

Human PDF Author: Mark Britnell
Publisher:
ISBN: 019883652X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on the author's experiences ranging from the world's most advanced hospitals to revolutionary new approaches in India and Africa, this book will challenge everything from the role of healthcare in the world economy to the training and leadership of the medical profession and the role of women in the workforce.

Crisis of Abundance

Crisis of Abundance PDF Author: Arnold S. Kling
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 1930865899
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Get Book Here

Book Description
America's health care troubles largely stem from a great success: modern medicine can do much more today than in the past. So what's the trouble? How to pay for it. In easily comprehensible prose, MIT-trained economist Arnold Kling explains better ways of financing health care for the poor, workers, the disabled, and the elderly. Kling predicts relying less on government and more on private savings would improve health outcomes. A must-read for health care reformers.

Understanding the Behavioral Healthcare Crisis

Understanding the Behavioral Healthcare Crisis PDF Author: Nicholas A. Cummings
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136805842
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
Understanding the Behavioral Healthcare Crisis is a necessary book, edited and contributed to by a great variety of authors from academia, government, and industry. The book takes a bold look at what reforms are needed in healthcare and provides specific recommendations. Some of the serious concerns about the healthcare system that Cummings, O’Donohue, and their contributors address include access problems, safety problems, costs problems, the uninsured, and problems with efficacy. When students, practitioners, researchers, and policy makers finish reading this book they will have not just a greater idea of what problems still exist in healthcare, but, more importantly, a clearer idea of how to tackle them and provide much-needed reform.

Retooling for an Aging America

Retooling for an Aging America PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309131952
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
As the first of the nation's 78 million baby boomers begin reaching age 65 in 2011, they will face a health care workforce that is too small and woefully unprepared to meet their specific health needs. Retooling for an Aging America calls for bold initiatives starting immediately to train all health care providers in the basics of geriatric care and to prepare family members and other informal caregivers, who currently receive little or no training in how to tend to their aging loved ones. The book also recommends that Medicare, Medicaid, and other health plans pay higher rates to boost recruitment and retention of geriatric specialists and care aides. Educators and health professional groups can use Retooling for an Aging America to institute or increase formal education and training in geriatrics. Consumer groups can use the book to advocate for improving the care for older adults. Health care professional and occupational groups can use it to improve the quality of health care jobs.