Home Care Workers in NYC

Home care workers (HCWs) deliver essential health services within patients’ homes, yet, they are a marginalized workforce vulnerable to exploitation. Critical and liberatory pedagogies can foster material social change, but such pedagogies typically assume the involvement of a professional facilitator when, in practice, support programs are often led by peers with little to no facilitation training. This paper explores how peers can perform critical and liberatory facilitation practice in an online support program.

Home care workers (HCWs) provide essential care in patients’ homes but are often underappreciated and work in stressful and isolated environments with diverse and intersecting support needs. This paper describes a computer-mediated peer support program that centers around sharing circles: spaces for personal, narrative storytelling to encourage HCWs to collaboratively reflect on their home care experiences and build rapport and shared identity with their peers. Our findings show that participants engaged in multiple types of peer support, and we discuss how computer-mediated programs can address diverse needs that occur in intersectional contexts.

Awarded a Recognition for Contribution to Diversity & Inclusion.

Despite their unique contributions to heart failure (HF) care, home healthcare workers (HHWs) have unmet educational needs and many lack HF caregiving self-efficacy. To address this, we used a community-partnered approach to develop and pilot a HF training course for HHWs. We used a mixed methods design with pre/post surveys and semi-structured interviews to evaluate the course on feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness. Post-training data showed significant improvements in HF knowledge and HF caregiving self-efficacy.

Home care workers (HCWs) provide in-home care services but feel underappreciated and isolated on the job. Leveraging the support of peers is one way to empower HCWs, but there are barriers to doing so due to the distributed nature of home care worker. In this study, we explore how HCWs value and conceptualize peer support, especially around needs of performing emotional labor and professionalization, and provide design implications for technology-enabled peer support.

Awarded a Recognition for Contribution to Diversity & Inclusion.

Question: What are the experiences of home health care workers caring for older adults and for patients with chronic illnesses during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic?

Findings: In this qualitative study of 33 home health care workers employed by 24 unique home care agencies across New York City, participants reported that they were at heightened risk for contracting and transmitting COVID-19. Despite providing integral care to vulnerable patients, home health care workers felt inadequately supported and generally invisible.

Meaning: During the COVID-19 pandemic, home health care workers experienced challenges that increased their vulnerability as a workforce.