Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Few Regulations Exist To Protect Elderly And Ill From Potentially Predatory Personal Care Aides
Boston Globe: Stranger In The House
The category of personal care aide is projected to add more jobs by 2026 than any other occupation in the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many of these aides enter the home as virtual unknowns, undergoing no background check and receiving little, if any, training. ... Crimes committed by home aides against their clients get little public attention in Massachusetts, in part because no single agency is charged with keeping track of the home aide workforce. (Matchan, 9/15)
In other news on home health care aides —
Boston Globe: Recent Immigrants Do Much Of The Low-Paying, Back-Breaking Work Of Caring For Frail Americans At Home. Back Home, They’re Seen As Success Stories.
People like [Rita] Sarpong are the backbone of one of the country’s fastest-growing and least-regulated industries, doing the important, if unglamorous, low-paid work of caring for people who can no longer care for themselves. The workers are overwhelmingly female and almost 50 percent foreign-born. In Massachusetts, a striking number of them emigrated from Ghana, hoping to earn enough to help support often desperate families back home and forming a trans-Atlantic economic pipeline from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States. (Matchan, 9/16)
