Promoting the Health, Safety and Well-being of Home Care and Health Care Workforce

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Our research promotes practices, products, and policies that address occupational safety, environmental safety, and patient safety in both home care and hospitals.

What's New

The Safe Home Care Project is excited to present the following materials from our current research on interventions to improve safety for home care workers and their clients/consumers.

  • A 31-page safety handbook designed to guide home care clients/consumers through the process of preparing their homes and understanding their role in creating the good working relationships that make it possible to get the most out of their home care visits

This safety handbook, created in collaboration with twelve research partners from the Massachusetts home care community, can be downloaded for printing services or distributed electronically in its entirety.

This video features animated illustrations from the safety handbook as well as interviews with home care aides who share reasons why they are committed to the field of care work and the well-being of their clients, and some features of the home care visit that help them do their best.

  • An online training course for Care Managers introducing the concepts of Motivational Interviewing and its application in coaching clients so they can take steps to improve safety when receiving care at home.

This course provides a certificate for 1 CEU in professional development training for nurses.

  • An online training course introducing the concepts of managing occupational safety and health in home care to identify and eliminate or reduce or hazards in the client home environment. Improving the safety of the aide will often improve client safety. This training is designed for home care agency managers and their employees, unions and the workforce they represent.

This course introduces concepts of occupational hazards, hazard identification and strategies for reducing or eliminating hazards using the NIOSH hierarchy of controls model. In public health, the discipline that addresses the health and safety of working people is referred to as “occupational safety and health.” The central occupational safety and health hazard prevention model is called the “hierarchy of controls.” The model is often illustrated by an inverted pyramid-shaped scale with the base representing the most effective way to control a hazard, which eliminates hazards from the working environment, and the peak representing the least effective way to control a hazard, which focuses on controlling hazards at the individual level.

This brochure, in a printable center-folding format, provides the most impactful initial study findings to guide practice improvements for home care providers. Our research continues on fully evaluating the Safe Home Care Intervention package for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Selected Publications

For a list of all publications see the "Publications page" in the navigation menu.