Managers play a crucial role in retaining direct care workers in long-term care for older adults, Philip Taylor, PhD, FGSA, said Monday during a webinar hosted by the Gerontology Institute at Georgia State University and the Southern Gerontological Society.
Taylor is a professor at Warwick University in Coventry, England. A grant from the Australian Association of Gerontology is funding his study of the management of long-term care facilities.
“The essence of the project was that amid concern about the sector’s workforce, there’s a need to problematize leadership and management to think about their skills deficits and how we might go about addressing them, and to consider the impact of that on the workforce and also ultimately on care quality,” Taylor said. “So I’m interested in these people managing facilities or managing their services.”
He was tasked with identifying the qualities and capabilities of good managers in long-term care. Research to date, he said, has focused on non-management workers and their role in the workforce shortage. Little literature is available on the role of managers, he added.
“There is a lot of concern about the stability of the long-term care workforce. Governments are getting very anxious about this whole issue.” he said.
According to the professor, the long-term care workforce comprises 1.9% of the global workforce. It won’t be large enough in the future, as the population ages.
“They’re saying the share will need to increase by over half a percent to meet projected needs for workers in the sector. And that’s a staggering number of people,” Taylor said.
As McKnight’s previously reported, between 2021 and 2031, the direct care workforce in the United States is projected to add more than 1 million new jobs, representing the largest growth of any job sector in the nation. Meanwhile, the oldest members of the large Baby Boom generation will turn 79 next year. Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, will make up the largest cohort of seniors ever here in just a few years.
Argentum previously estimated that by 2040, long-term care settings will have 20 million job openings — 3 million of those alone in senior living, and the rest in other settings.
Pay is a big factor in the successful recruiting and retaining of direct care workers, Taylor noted, but it’s not the only factor. Job quality also plays a role, he said.
“The problem I see is, we can get people in, but they don’t stay in the sector,” Taylor said. This is where managers can make a difference, by ensuring good working conditions for people who want to care for older adults, he added.
“My argument is that we need competent managers if we’re going to achieve excellence in long-term care,” Taylor said. “We have heard that ongoing training and continuing professional development [for managers] is not readily available. Approved providers have not invested in training or leadership to the extent needed to enable their services to function at the level necessary to provide high-quality care.”
Taylor said that his research generally points to management being important, “but studies didn’t always find that management was important.” He said he believes that the result of this current project will be “better managers, happier workers, better care, less turnover [and] more productivity.”
