• Posted April 10, 2025

Co-ops Offer Welcome Alternative For Home Care Workers

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:

• Report high levels of input and control over patient care, scheduling and agency policies.

• Feel a sense of community, camaraderie and teamwork stemming from their ownership.

• Enjoy a culture of respect.

• Receive better overall compensation, including higher wages, better benefits and profit sharing.

“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.

More information

The Cooperative Development Foundation has more on home care cooperatives.

SOURCES: JAMA Network Open, April 7, 2025; UCLA, news release, April 7, 2025