Job demands among personal care assistants caring for family member

Approximately 17,700 homecare agencies and organizations operate in the United States. To supplement the agency model, especially for the provision of personal care, a growing number of states have adopted “consumer-directed” programs. A unique aspect of these programs in some states is the consumers' ability to hire a family member or friend to provide homecare services. However, a number of states prohibit home care workers from caring for family members, presumably because of concerns that this work should not be compensated or that the service is not legitimate. We had the opportunity to compare the work demands of caring for a family member and non-family members in a self-administered survey of 980 Personal Care Assistants (PCAs) working in an urban area in a large Midwest state. Greater than 20% of this population (n=194) care for family members exclusively. We compared the work demands of this group of workers compared with 663 PCAs who cared for non-family members. Findings include that significant differences between the work demands of these two populations included greater physical demands, mean demand score (.74 vs. .52), greater mean emotional demand score (2.08 vs. 1.59) and lower mean work-related burnout (1.06 vs. 1.23). Additionally, PCAs caring for family members reported a significantly greater number of unpaid visits and on-call hours, as well as more out of pocket expenses than those caring for non-family members. The implications of these finding will be discussed.