The home care worker shortage is beyond a crisis point for the field. It’s now a federal emergency.

When home care agencies are rejecting as many as 40% of new referrals, which reports are indicating, according to Bill Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice in a CNN article, this spells trouble for the entire healthcare system.

The problem, as we know, is not confined to home care. Hospices, nursing homes and other congregate living facilities are also struggling with limited staff.

And the home care staffing shortage has a snowball effect. If a person can’t receive adequate care at home, they then are forced to go to a nursing home, putting strain on an already-taxed part of the healthcare system.

Any way you look at it, it amounts to no good. 

Challenging problems call for creative solutions. And industry offers plenty of those. Just this week, Encompass Health, for example, announced it will be hiring a human resources director and talent acquisition specialist for the newly created Enhabit Home Health & Hospice spin-off.

That is a good idea. Ultimately, companies may need to soul search to crack the problem. Given that a recent industry study found effective onboarding and orientation problems are more important to employees than wages, it’s high-time to reexamine what really makes employees stay.

Of course, the best answers come when government and industry work together. Passing Build Back Better, which would infuse home- and community-based services with more Medicaid funding to pay caregivers is beyond essential. Other helpful remedies may include investing more in the National Volunteer Care Corps, which the government established in 2019  to grow a network of volunteer caregivers for the elderly and disabled.

There is no magic bullet. But with all the stakeholders chipping away at the problem from their various vantage points, there may start to be movement in the right direction.

Liza Berger is editor of McKnight’s Home Care. Email her at [email protected]. Follow her @LizaBerger19.