Over at the PHI blog, Elise shares an interview of Barbara Bowers with readers. It’s pertinent here as well. Barbara is a tireless advocate for CNA’s and direct care givers- advocating better working conditions and wages among other things.

Nurture relationships between direct-care workers and the people they care for. “Those relationships are the most important thing to people in long-term care. That I’ve heard from the first day, and hear over and over again,” she says. “We know that, yet we still don’t seem to do much about it. We still don’t even have permanent assignments in lots of places.”

Show more respect for direct-care workers. “I think we need to better understand how to be supportive of CNAs,” she says. “I still hear all the time that CNAs feel like they’re looked down on, scolded publicly, humiliated. The nurses doing that don’t realize they’re doing it at all - they don’t mean to do it. I think they actually have a tremendous amount of respect for CNAs. They just don’t know how to supervise.”

Improve wage, benefits, and staffing ratios. “Certainly we need more staffing and we need more money,” she says. “I don’t know if we need any more studies to tell us people would be happier if they got paid better and they got better benefits - we just need to do something about it.”

Give CNAs more control over their work. “I don’t know if we know enough about how to better organize the work so CNAs can get more control over their work flow, so they can do what they know they need to do.” Hiring enough people is part of it, she says, but that’s not the only factor. “It’s also things like how they’re supervised, how they’re trained.”

At another time I will further address some of the points listed here…I think there’s a lot more to all this that needs to be spoken about.