Home Health Care

Solutions Insights Lab is working with The Rippel Foundation’s Healing Home Care team to highlight solutions that improve the recognition and respect of home care workers and effectively integrate them into wider clinical care teams. SIL is conducting 30 interviews with stakeholders across the ecosystem in Philadelphia, PA: home care workers, home care agency representatives, worker advocates, hospital administrators, and policymakers.

Our research, which is ongoing through the end of 2027, has surfaced insights that can help home care workers both feel more recognition for the integral work they do and integrate them into clinical workflows, which ensures they can deliver safe, consistent, and high-quality care. Everyone will need care at some point in their lives. Home care workers are integral to these generational care needs and should be integrated, respected members of a broader care team.

Recognition and respect are not symbolic gestures for home care workers—they are requirements for delivering higher quality and effective care. Evidence shows that simple gestures of recognition and respect strengthen job satisfaction and retention, stabilizing the workforce and making caregiver-client relationships more consistent over time. Home care is relational work. When workers are treated as professionals, they invest more in the relationship—strengthening communication and coordination that improves decision-making and day-to-day care.

This is highly skilled work, blending technical care with continuous judgment, observation, and communication. Home care workers want to be acknowledged and listened to as the important front line workers that they are. This happens by creating more opportunities for relationship-centered support (peer groups, appreciation spaces, community gatherings, and celebrations), integrating home care workers into decision making (for example, through worker-led cooperative models), and investing in training, advancement pathways, and career mobility.

Recognition and respect are not just moral imperatives—they determine whether home care workers are meaningfully integrated into clinical workflows. When workers are treated as peripheral to the care team, they are often excluded from care planning and communication, leaving them without critical day-to-day information about patients. This weakens coordination, lowers the quality of care they can provide, and increases the risk of complications and hospital readmissions. Integration, therefore, is not an add-on but essential for safe, consistent, and high-quality care. Organizations can support it through targeted advocacy and education outreach with broader clinical teams—doctors, nurses, therapists, and hospital leadership—to emphasize the value of including home care workers in care planning discussions. Establishing low-barrier pathways for ongoing communication and partnering with families as advocates for change are also key steps.