Home Care

The first book to deal compassionately and objectively with a major social problem.

Large and growing numbers of the frail elderly and disabled depend on paid workers to assist them in daily life. Identifying critical factors that affect the work conditions and job satisfaction of the home aide work force, the authors also describe demonstration programs that document the potential for work life changes in the home care industry--changes that will improve quality of work life, reduce turnover, and contribute to greater continuity of care. Managerial strategies and the policy changes necessary to implement these innovations are thoroughly explored.

This volume examines policies and programs of compensation for family caregivers of the disabled elderly from a broad analytical perspective, weighing current policies of home care services against principles of access, equity, quality, and funding of long-term care. The authors focus on programs and policies that already exist which could be adjusted to include families and to promote support of family caregiving. In assessing the potential of broad implementation of wages for caring, they contend that if implemented appropriately, family compensation may offer benefits not available through any other kind of service system.

Providing an original look at twentieth-century service occupations, Nona Y. Glazer offers an innovative interpretation of how managers reduce labor costs by shifting labor for paid women workers to women as family members. She critically examines the past and present practices of retailing and health service occupations as a way to better understand the deskilling, speed-ups, and job consolidation of nurses, salesclerks, and cashiers.Glazer calls the shifting of tasks from paid to unpaid labor the "work transfer," one of the many mechanisms that managers used to change the labor process in service jobs. She maintains that these shifts in labor costs increase profit margins in a capitalistic economy that demands such increases. Drawing on social history, economics, interviews with health service workers, union newsletter accounts, and advertisements in mass market magazines and retail trade journals, this book affords new insights into how the hidden work of women is structured by changes in paid labor. Author note: Nona Y. Glazer is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at Portland State University and the editor of Woman in a Man-Made World and New Family/Old Family.

Leutz and his colleagues address a critical gap in health-care services for the elderly who live in the nation's communities. They provide practical guidance for implementing a community-based program of care and present new analyses of the range of needs among the frail aged. The book shows that planners and providers ought to consider differences in gender, culture, and individual status when determining health care needs. The authors carefully evaluate the range of needs, including demographics, gender and cultural differences, public and responses, and the effectiveness of Medicare and Medicaid.