Like a carpenter ripping up a wooden porch and exposing termites eating away at the support beams, a new report on the human services industry has exposed an immediate crisis.
Some of the toughest, most physically-demanding jobs done by people who help seniors stay in their homes and aid autistic people and people with disabilities are going unfilled for a variety of challenging reasons.
Even Northeast Arc, a provider organization with 1,200 employees serving 9,000 clients, is having a tough time attracting new employees. Arc’s chief executive officer said the organization competes with higher-paying hospitals for trained and certified workers.
Jo Ann Simons offered a grim assessment of the human services hiring crisis when she concluded, “I don’t see an end in sight and I certainly don’t see a quick fix.”
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This is bad news in a state where a third of Massachusetts’ population will be 55 or older by 2025, according to the University of Massachusetts study. Anyone with elderly parents knows that human services workers are worth their weight in gold. The best employees in the human services industry are compassionate, patient people who bring joy and understanding to a person made even lonelier by physical limitations.
The modern reality facing most American families is one where people in their 40s and 50s are just concluding a caregiving role for their children and transitioning quickly to caring for aging parents.
Personality clashes, emotional upheavals and physical and financial limitations make this child-becoming-caregiver role difficult and, sometimes, dangerous. Enter the human services worker who brings professional perspective to caregiving and helps families sort out their challenges.
Many seniors in Massachusetts, many disabled younger individuals, live at home with people who love them, thanks to hard-working human services caregivers who spend a few hours a week, sometimes more, in a family’s home.
Helping to get someone dressed, go to the bathroom and bathe, helping them to eat are job descriptions that do not necessarily appeal to a broad range of people looking for a job. It is not an exaggeration to suggest a good human services provider is a big-hearted person who instinctively reaches out to people in need to offer support.
Money, training and employee recruitment obstacles are some of the challenges on Simon’s mind when she says there is no “quick fix” for the human services workforce shortage. State legislators and agencies have taken stabs in the past at trying to improve wages and work conditions for human services workers with mixed success.
The time has come for leaders at the state levels to shine a bright light on the crisis and engage a broad spectrum of informed individuals in discussions and planning for ways to recruit and train human services workers.
Ignoring the human services industry workforce shortage means ignoring some of the state’s neediest residents.