Caregiver standards: More doesn't always mean better

An April 23 guest column, "More training for long-term care workers," suggests we need to pass an initiative, such as I-1029, to require higher caregiver training standards. That's unnecessary and wasteful of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Perhaps worse yet, requiring 75 hours of training will create a barrier to thousands of entry-level caregivers. If thousands of workers are eliminated from our care delivery system, who will care for seniors and people with disabilities?

Will those seniors and people with disabilities be forced to move to nursing homes because they can no longer find caregivers to provide the help they need? Those issues must be given considerable thought before changing training standards, particularly when there has been no finding that our current training system is flawed.

As providers of care and services to seniors and people with disabilities, we would support higher training standards if we were experiencing poor care outcomes caused by untrained staff. But our caregivers already are prepared to meet the needs of seniors and people with disabilities and they provide essential support to our state's licensed nurses.

Once core education is provided, we know that appropriate mentoring and professional supervision are what is essential to ensure continued competency. This is the recipe for quality care, not more time sitting in a classroom.

The majority of the Long Term Care Training Task Force did not support 75 hours of training for caregivers. A review of official meeting minutes will confirm that the committee was split on the issue. There was no consensus that additional training would actually lead to higher care standards.

Washington legislators did not fail to act, as previous guest columnists claim. With nearly unanimous votes in both the House and the Senate, they were poised to pass a bill that would have required 35 hours of basic training, with opportunities for additional training hours and a career pathway to certification for caregivers. The same bill would have required background checks and registration for all long-term care workers to strengthen public safety protections. Despite the intense advocacy of groups like ours to pass the measure, the bill died during the last hours of session because the union opposed it and political leaders prevented the bill from going to the floor for final passage.

Your state legislators acted with considerable thought and a desire to make good public policy. Because they did listen to both sides of the debate, they understood that more is not always better. They did not want to create unnecessary taxpayer expense. They did not want to build unnecessary barriers that would limit the number of people joining a vitally important work force. They wanted to be sure that caregivers were properly trained and available in sufficient numbers to care for your loved ones and to care for you when the time comes. Your legislators' focus was on building a competent and adequate work force of professional caregivers -- not an arbitrary number of training hours.

If you have the opportunity to sign or vote on a caregiver training initiative, ask the hard questions and get all the facts. Find out who's behind it. Read the fine print. The initiative title to I-1029 will not tell the whole story.