For direct care workers, the first few weeks on the job can be challenging—and the most crucial to their retention.
“No matter how much training you do, those first six to eight weeks are where most of the turnover happens,” PHI Senior Advisor Peggy Powell told me. Powell has designed training, recruitment, and retention programs for direct care workers (who include home care workers, residential care aides, and nursing assistants) for more than three decades.
The long-term care field has traditionally offered low-paying, poorly supported jobs for the difficult labor of assisting older adults and people with disabilities in their homes or other care settings, making workforce retention a longstanding challenge. A recent study by Poon et al. confirms that formal peer mentorship programs, a critical component of PHI’s workforce interventions, help both new and incumbent workers navigate the significant learning curve, emotional demands, and marginalization faced in care work.
The study’s findings are timely: the COVID-19 pandemic has left direct care roles even harder to fill over the last two years, with shortages of home care workers and nursing assistants continuing to affect long-term care consumers across the U.S.
- Originally published in PHI Newsroom.
