The Direct Care News 
For direct care workers and their allies May 15, 2012
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Study Finds Link Between Low Staffing and Nursing Home Deaths
|  Plenty of studies have shown that care quality in nursing homes suffers when nursing assistants "work short," but a new analysis of Medicare and other data reaches a startling conclusion: Nursing assistant staffing levels may literally be a matter of life and death for nursing home residents.
A group of researchers from the University of California, Davis, looked into why more people die during times of low unemployment, questioning the conventional wisdom that the cause is stress from overwork. They found that only 9 percent of the 6,700 additional deaths associated with a one-percent decline in unemployment in 2006 occurred among people of working age, while three-quarters occurred among elders. Women over 65 were particularly hard hit, accounting for more than half (55%) of the deaths. Read more.
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Direct from Washington, DC
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Senator Harkin weighs in on long-term care: Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), Chairman of the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee, submitted a sense of the Senate resolution to improve the quality of direct care jobs and make home and community-based long-term services and supports affordable and accessible for seniors and people with disabilities.
Long-term care reform briefing next week: Caring Across Generations is hosting a legislative Town Hall meeting next Monday, May 21, at 11 a.m. at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. People from across the country will share their stories about why we need to reform our long-term care system.
Inside health reform: The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation announced its first 26 awards to organizations for projects that aim to improve health care and lower costs for people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program. The next batch of awardees will be announced in June. Read more.
House budget proposes deep cuts to HCBS: The Republican-led House of Representatives passed a budget that will slash funding for home and community-based services. Read more.
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 | | Tina Tilley |
I would like to tell you about my friend Kevin.
Kevin was born in the late 1950s with a condition we now refer to as autism. Since autism wasn't widely known until decades later, Kevin was more than likely simply labeled as "retarded." He came from a fairly large family and went to school until he was around ten years old.
After this, Kevin's history is spotty at best because he was mostly hidden from the outside world. His extended family described him as the "wild boy," left to his own devices much of the time and roaming the wooded area behind his run-down family home. Read more from Tina Tilley.
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