Skip to main content

Co-ops Offer Welcome Alternative For Home Care Workers

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on April 10, 2025.

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, April 10, 2025 -- There are all sorts of co-ops – credit unions, employee-owned businesses, utility providers, farmers’ cooperatives.

But a new type of co-op might be the key to caring for aging Americans amid a shortage of paid caregivers, a new study suggests.

Home care cooperatives could be the key to making sure the elderly get the care they need, researchers reported April 7 in JAMA Network Open.

Co-op workers are better paid and feel more valued than their counterparts in traditional home care services, researchers said.

“Home care cooperatives represent an innovative approach to addressing the caregiver crisis to improve caregiver job quality and retention,” lead researcher Dr. Geoffrey Gusoff said in a news release. He's an assistant professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Home care cooperatives provide the same sort of daily living assistance to the elderly as traditional home care agencies: bathing, medication management, meal preparation and so forth.

But home care cooperatives are owned by the workers who deliver these services, providing a stronger sense of collaboration and ownership for employees.

Although demand for home care workers is at an all-time high – with an additional 800,000 workers needed during the next 10 years – the relative supply of these workers is at a historic low, researchers said in background notes.

Turnover rates for home care workers can be as high as 82% a year, driven by low job quality, poor working conditions, limited benefits and the lowest wages in health care, researchers said.

In interviews with 23 home care workers and nine staff members from five cooperatives, researchers found that co-op employees:

“Other home care businesses can learn from cooperatives' practices to improve caregiver jobs and ultimately retain and recruit more caregivers to meet the growing demand,” Gusoff said.

However, more research is needed to further identify good ways to promote job satisfaction among home care workers, researchers said.

“The next step is to test the factors identified in the study through a national caregiver survey to better quantify the role of each factor in caregiver retention, satisfaction, and care quality,” Gusoff said.

Sources

  • JAMA Network Open, April 7, 2025
  • UCLA, news release, April 7, 2025

Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Read this next

More Than 1.8 Million Ninja Pressure Cookers Recalled for Burn Risk

FRIDAY, May 2, 2025 — More than 1.8 million Ninja Foodi pressure cookers are being recalled due to a risk of burns, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission...

RFK Jr. to Change Vaccine Testing Rules

FRIDAY, May 2, 2025 — U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to change how vaccines are tested in the U.S., a decision that could impact how...

Scooter Riders Were High Or Drunk In A Quarter Of Wrecks

FRIDAY, May 2, 2025 -- Don’t drink and drive is a message the public has largely accepted. Now how about don’t drink and scoot? A quarter of people injured in...

More news resources

Subscribe to our newsletter

Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.