Recruiting and retaining a stable direct support workforce
is important to the lives of people with disabilities and their families.
How else can providers offer consistent, quality supports based upon
long-term and well-established relationships? Unfortunately, the direct support
professional (DSP) workforce is in crisis. Low wages coupled with physically
and emotionally demanding work has resulted in high turnover and heavy vacancies.
To alleviate this crisis,
the American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR)
created a National Advocacy Campaign and initiated legislation
sponsored by Congresswoman Lois Capps (D-CA) and Congressman Lee
Terry (R-NE). Together they introduced the Direct Support Professionals
Fairness and Security Act (H.R. 1279), which recognizes the urgent
national workforce crisis facing our nation. The legislation comes
at a critical juncture. It would take the first important step
toward stabilizing the direct support professional workforce—a
step needed to ensure that people with disabilities will receive
the quality supports and services they need from community-based
service providers and that state and federal funding require.
This legislation would
make a much needed national investment and create an incentive — all
through a joint federal-state-private partnership — to address
one of our most pressing challenges in the 21st century. The bill
would empower our nation’s governors
with additional resources to help ensure quality supports and services
that underpin a productive and meaningful life in the community of
choice for people with disabilities. It does so by establishing a
5-year program to provide participating states with additional Medicaid
funds in order to increase wages for direct support professionals.
The wages for DSPs working in the community are paid almost entirely
from a federal and state Medicaid funding. Historically, these governmental
funding streams have not kept pace with general market demands, nor
have they kept pace with compensation for state employees who are performing
the same job functions in state-operated programs and institutions.
The economic challenges faced by DSPs have led to high turnover and
ongoing vacancies among direct support staff. Annual DSP turnover rates
range from 40% to over 75%. At the same time, there is an increasing
demand for DSPs for the following reasons:
• The growing trend for supporting people with disabilities in smaller
residential settings or in their own homes.
• Family caregivers
are aging and individuals with disabilities are living longer,
therefore increasing the demands for more DSPs.
• In its Olmstead
decision, the Supreme Court affirmed the right of individuals with
disabilities to receive community-based services as an alternative
to institutional care. The demand for community supports and services
is growing rapidly as states comply with Olmstead and continue
to move more individuals from institutions into the community.
Additionally, high turnover
and lengthy vacancies are requiring support and service providers
to spend disproportionate amounts of time and money on recruitment,
orientation and training, thereby reducing resources for actual
service and support. System-wide, organizational resources are
being sapped by staffing crises to the detriment of supports and
services, advancing inclusion and personal safety.
Your help is needed
With
a total of 113 co-sponsors, H.R. 1279 is well on the road, but
hasn’t arrived at its final destination. Congress is now
in session for the second half of the 110th Congress and the time
is right to make a renewed push to get your representative in Congress
to support H.R. 1279. You can make a difference by taking action
through the American Network of Community Options and Resources’ automatic
online Action Center. Send a letter to your representative by visiting
www.capwiz.com/
For more
info about ANCOR’s National Advocacy Campaign, visit www.youneedtoknowme.org
