Karen Mey lies motionless beneath a tan electric blanket pulled up to her chin. Next to her recliner, a machine the size of a toaster oven huffs rhythmically like a person in deep sleep, pumping air through a corrugated tube into a plastic valve in her neck. Even though her body is immobile, Mey’s eyes […]

Certified nurse aides provide most of the direct hands-on care to the nation’s 1.3 million nursing home residents. Aides’ central role in caregiving means that the training that aides receive to become certified must be adequate and appropriate to ensure that they are capable of providing high quality of care and quality of life services […]

The benefits of expanding funding for Medicaid long-term care home and community-based services (HCBS) relative to institutional care are often taken as self-evident. However, little is known about the outcomes of these services, especially for racial and ethnic minority groups, whose members tend to use the services more than whites do, and for people with […]

The care worker’s lot is not an easy one. A typical care worker, says Priscilla Smith, a certified nursing assistant in Durham, North Carolina, must “hop from company to company just to make ends meet,” which generally includes caring for a handful of clients. “If you [care for] someone with a general disability, you may […]

As hospital care has become prohibitively expensive, home health care has swelled into a $7 billion industry, generating a wave of corporate investment. Growth has been so rapid that the industry has even attracted interest from foreign companies. Yet the field also has spawned alternatives to the dominant corporate model, including cooperatives that aim to […]