It’s been a little more than a year since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed - a drama that is still unfolding in battles around its implementation and funding. Back when health reform was just a gleam in then Senator Obama's eye, the Hartford Foundation worked with its 
long-time friends and allies to form the Eldercare Workforce Alliance, a broad coalition of parties representing consumer and family organizations, direct care worker interests, health professional associations, and health care delivery organizations with the mission of implementing the recommendations of the April 2008 Institute of Medicine report, Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce.
The Alliance had barely received its first check in April of 2009 when health reform started to boil. It was suddenly urgent to advocate for the inclusion of eldercare workforce concerns before history passed us by. That urgency has been unrelenting over the past year, as efforts have shifted to focus on implementation and appropriations. Along with our other external funding partner, The Atlantic Philanthropies, and the 28 contributing member organizations, we are engaged in what will be a long struggle to ensure that the workforce implications of caring for older Americans are adequately addressed in federal programs and regulation. The priorities of the Alliance include: improving the training and compensation of the direct-care workforce; requiring competence in geriatrics from all health professionals as well as increasing the number of those specializing in the field; and supporting the adoption of innovative models of care that will better meet the needs of older people and make better use of current workforce capabilities.
In the last several weeks the Alliance has reached a couple of milestones: it has set up a new "all mod cons" Web site to better capture its activities and positions: http://www.eldercareworkforce.org/. To go with its new site, it has a new logo and communications campaign – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Its new tag line is,
"Advocating Team Care for Older Adults." Check out the Web site and watch the video of Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Advocacy. Share your story and take action. Also, several Alliance members contributed to the special issue of Generations, the Journal of the American Society on Aging, one that could be re-titled Retooling for an Aging America at Three: More Urgent than Ever. Read the updates in Generations.
We are proud to have helped seed the Eldercare Workforce Alliance and we hope you’ll join us in supporting their critical efforts.