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Op-Ed: Sustaining the Caregiving Workforce for New York’s Aging Future

Commentary/Op-Ed - March 2018

Op-Ed: Sustaining the Caregiving Workforce for New York’s Aging Future

New York City is facing an impending healthcare crisis. An imminent shortage of home care workers and supportive services threatens to erode the quality of life, safety, and health of older New Yorkers and their families.The state should take the lead to ensure that families have affordable, quality options for protecting the health and safety of older adults.

by Liz Krueger and Christian Gonzalez-Rivera

Tags: aging healthcare older new yorkers

In New York City, the number of people over age 65 has passed the one million mark for the first time in history and 462,000 of those are over 75 years old. By 2040, one in five city residents will be an older adult. An imminent shortage of home care workers and supportive services threatens to erode the quality of life, safety, and health for this record number of older New Yorkers and their families.  

In this New York Nonprofit Media op-ed, New York State Senator Liz Krueger and the Center for an Urban Future Senior Researcher Christian González-Rivera assert that in order to meet the swelling demand for home health services we must attract more people to the profession and reduce turnover. Achieving this will require adequate funding for long-term care, more and better training opportunities for workers, and giving aides the respect and authority they deserve as key professionals within a care team. 

Read the op-ed here.

This op-ed is a continuation of the Center for an Urban Future's extensive research on older New Yorkers, including the groundbreaking studies, The New Face of New York's Seniors and The Aging Apple: Older Immigrants a Rising Share of New York's Seniors.

Photo Credit: Cristian Newman/ Unsplash

General operating support for the Center for an Urban Future is provided by The Clark Foundation, the Bernard F. and Alva B. Gimbel Foundation, and Altman Foundation. 

Center for an Urban Future (CUF) is an independent, nonprofit think tank that generates innovative policies to create jobs, reduce inequality, and help lower income New Yorkers climb into the middle class. For 20 years, CUF has published accessible, data-driven reports on ways to grow and diversify the economy and expand opportunity that are anchored in rigorous research, not preconceived notions about outcome. Our work has been a powerful catalyst for policy change in New York City and serves as an invaluable resource for government officials, community groups, nonprofit practitioners and business leaders as they advocate for and implement policies to address some of New York’s biggest challenges and opportunities.