Following a year-long joint effort to better understand direct care workers’ most pressing needs, the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services announced last week that 20 states will receive technical assistance to bolster recruiting, training and retention initiatives.
Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, New Jersey and New Mexico will receive intensive technical assistance, granting up to 250 hours of training to help stakeholders with recruiting and developing their direct care workforce, according to HHS. Another 14 states will receive 70 hours of education programs meant to teach best practices and innovative strategies that can grow their workforce.
These technical assistance opportunities intend to fill knowledge gaps about direct care workers and help inform policies to provide them with more support, HHS said.
“Making informed policy decisions to expand and strengthen the HCBS workforce can be difficult with the data currently available,” HHS said in a statement. “Information is often unavailable or incomplete, and much of the data that is available cannot be broken out by state, making it difficult to understand the impact of Medicaid and other policies.”
HCBS data collection
HHS and DOL spent the past year researching ways to collect better data on the needs of home- and community-based services workers. The agencies released an issue brief summarizing their results last Thursday.
One of the biggest challenges, they said, is that there is no national standard by which HCBS workers are classified. There is also no standard definition of these workers’ duties. Establishing such definitions would allow HHS and other agencies to distinguish HCBS workers’ needs from those of other healthcare workers and help policymakers tailor solutions to grow this workforce.
“In order to better understand this critical sector and to improve job quality for these workers, we need the best possible data,” Julie Su, acting Secretary of Labor, said in a statement. “Care workers show up every day to ensure people have the support they need. We need to show up for them to ensure these are quality jobs with family-sustaining wages, safety standards, and benefits.”
Adequate reimbursement up in air
Similarly, this lack of definition also makes it tricky for policymakers to determine adequate reimbursement rates for HCBS, given the wide variance of services and provider types that may be considered HCBS.
HHS noted that it has taken recent steps to improve HCBS data collection. The Medicaid Access Rule, which was released in April, includes some provisions meant to create more transparency related to HCBS programs. Providers have applauded these provisions as positive changes within an otherwise unpopular rule.
“The rule … improves oversight, accountability, and transparency in HCBS by requiring states to report on the number of people on HCBS waiting lists and how the states maintain their waiting lists, HCBS service delivery timeliness for certain HCBS, and a standardized set of HCBS quality measures,” HHS and DOL wrote in the issue brief. “In combination, these requirements will substantially advance our understanding of HCBS workforce compensation, payment adequacy, access, and quality.”
This story originally appeared in McKnight’s Home Care.
