Professional Caregivers in Your Organization

Who are they?

If your organization has a healthcare or eldercare mission, it is easy to spot caregivers. Many of your employees are professional caregivers: nurses, social workers, physicians, physician assistants, therapists, and direct-care workers, known as hospital, nursing home, home health or personal care aides.

Your employees may have many years of college education, briefer technical preparation or on-the-job training. Whatever their preparation, these professionals are the core of your organization; they diagnose, treat and care for patients or clients, across the lifespan and around the clock.

Why support them?

If you employ professional caregivers, whether you are a C-level executive or front-line supervisor, you know that your organization’s mission, reputation and bottom-line are tied to the effective functioning of professional caregivers on your staff. You also know that financial pressures, regulatory demands, staffing shortages and turnover affect staff performance, contributing to workplace stress, costly medical complications and losses in productivity.

For your organization to be the best, you need your staff to be their best. Creating a healthy workplace and helping professional caregivers manage their stress can make the difference between organizational excellence and mediocrity, or worse.

Currently, over 18 million Americans work in healthcare: nearly 3 million are registered nurses and almost the same numbers are paraprofessionals.¹

The healthcare workforce is expected to grow 19% from 2014-2024, much faster than the average for all occupations. Approximately 2.3 million new healthcare jobs will be created, more than in any other industry. This represents 1 in 4 new jobs.²

The direct-care workforce, comprised of aides, orderlies and attendants is expected to approach 5 million by 2020, overcoming registered nurses as the healthcare sector’s largest occupational group.³

Graying of the US population and explosion of health-related technology will certainly increase demand for the help and healing that professional caregivers provide. But the cost of care and aging of the workforce threatens access to care, making the health, recruitment and retention of professional caregivers a critical issue.