Margaret Quinn of the Safe Home Care project

Improving health and safety to bolster home health workforce recruitment and retention is the goal of a new, $2.48 million research endeavor at the Safe Home Care Project of UMass Lowell.

Investigators will partner with local agencies to identify safety interventions for aides and patients that might reduce injuries and cut down on turnover.

“While our studies have focused on the safety and health of aides, we’ve found many home care hazards that put clients and families at risk as well, such as fire and fall hazards, unhealthy indoor air quality and infection hazards,” said Margaret Quinn, a professor emeritus who leads the Safe Home Care Project. “In this new study, we will bring together home care employers and aides, as well as clients and families, to try out ways to improve safety. It’s about going forward and finding solutions that work for all parties in home care.”

Funding comes from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Goals of the project:

  • Produce guidelines, including a booklet, on safe practices for clients and families on how to prepare where they live for safe home care.
  • Develop safety tools and techniques that can be introduced to clients when they are assessed for home care visits to identify factors that can be addressed to avoid potential problems, from preventing falls and infection to safe disposal of syringes and other sharps.
  • Evaluate whether the tools introduced are beneficial to aides, clients and home care partners.

The Safe Home Care team has spent 15 years researching related issues across Massachusetts and the United States. Challenges addressed include an aging population that translates into more people facing multiple chronic illnesses, including cancer, dementia, diabetes and lung and heart disease. Those medically complex charges, many of whom also have mobility issues, can make in-home assistive care more like nursing home care.

“Our research shows that home care aides report a high level of job satisfaction and get great reward from helping people age in place in their homes with dignity,” Quinn said in a press release. “Yet we’ve also found a number of safety hazards that make the job conditions challenging for aides. If an aide gets hurt, she can lose time from work and can’t always make it back for the next visit; this is hard on the aide and on the client and their families. It’s also hard on home care agency employers, who are increasingly faced with employee shortages and turnover.”