Home care cooperatives may be the key to alleviating the shortage of paid caregivers for older Americans, according to a new study co-authored by Senior Associate Dean for Outreach and Sponsored Research Ariel Avgar, Ph.D. '08, and Dr. Madeline Sterling, A&S '08, associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and director of ILR's Initiative on Home Care Work.
The research, Perceived Contributors to Job Quality and Retention at Home Care Cooperatives, published April 7 in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Network Open, found that workers in cooperatives experienced more respect, control, job support and compensation than their counterparts in traditional care services. These factors may explain how cooperatives have half the turnover rates of traditional agencies, which are plagued with high turnover and employee dissatisfaction.
The study's lead author is Dr. Geoffrey Gusoff, an assistant professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, is an affiliate of ILR's Initiative on Home Care Work, and the study was partially funded by a Center for Applied Research on Work (CAROW) pilot grant.
"A study like this really illustrates the importance of having the Initiative on Home Care Work," said Avgar, ILR's David M. Cohen '73 Professor of Labor Relations and director of CAROW. "lt helps us to connect scholars across Cornell, and across the nation, who are studying home care in very different settings and allows them to work together in a really impactful way.
"At the ILR School, we tend to study home care work in unionized settings, and this study by Dr. Gusoff allows us to focus on a different institutional configuration, namely cooperatives, to better understand home care work and its contribution to patient care."
Home care cooperatives provide the same daily living assistance to the elderly such as bathing, medication management and meal preparation, as do traditional home care services. Unlike traditional home care services, cooperatives are owned and operated by the home care workers who deliver these services, leading to a more collaborative experience and sense of ownership for the participants.
Read the full story on the ILR website.
Julie Greco is the Communications Director at the ILR School.
Portions of this story courtesy of Enrique Rivero of the UCLA Health media relations team.
