As most people were winding down last Friday night, Andrea Howell’s work was just getting started.
As a direct support professional, Howell provides care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She spends her Fridays caring for Amber and Tonisha, two clients living at a group home in Olathe.
Any other day, she’d be cooking dinner after picking them up from their day activities. But Fridays mark a special event in the home — when they celebrate the end of their week by eating out.
“Where are you going to dinner today? What do you want to eat?” Howell asks the girls. Amber chants her favorite spot, McDonald’s, which Howell says she picks almost every week.
It’s the end of a long week for Howell, who usually spends around 50 hours a week at the group home. And she has another caretaking job on top of that.
A national workforce crisis
That staggering workload is all too familiar to direct care workers nationwide as the industry grapples with a chronic staffing shortage that’s been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were (in) a workforce crisis before COVID happened and it, of course, didn’t get better. It has continued to get worked up, but just like it has across the entire healthcare spectrum,” says Valerie Huhn, acting director of the Missouri Department of Mental Health.
Huhn says nearly 77% of people that started in the field in 2019 ended up leaving. She suspects the level of pay is largely why people quit.
Huhn says state base wages are now up to about $12 an hour. That pay may have been practical when budgets were made, but the market has drastically changed in the last two years.
That change has driven waves of nurses to leave their local hospitals for higher paying travel jobs elsewhere. Likewise, local agencies say that direct care workers are leaving the field for businesses that have raised their base wages during the pandemic.
“Still not enough”
That’s been the case at Alternative Solutions, the Olathe-based direct care agency that Howell works for. The agency’s director, Demarcus January, says that in the first two months of the pandemic, his staff roster of about 40 employees declined by half.
January says workers were leaving at first out of safety concerns, when so much about COVID was unknown. But even when case numbers declined, his workers didn’t return in sufficient numbers to make up for those who left.
He says many left for higher paying gig work at companies like Postmates or Ubereats.
On top of that, January says it’s hard to attract applicants when businesses and care agencies are all competing for the same limited pool of workers.
