By Robyn Stone
The LeadingAge LTSS Center was ready when COVID-19 focused public attention on the need to strengthen the LTSS workforce. Now, policymakers are listening to our research-based recommendations.
On Nov. 9, 2020, as the nation was suffering through another deadly surge of the coronavirus pandemic, the drug maker Pfizer announced that its new vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 among trial volunteers.
The news was lauded as “historical” in The New York Times. Scientists were stunned. Stocks surged. Kathrin Jansen, head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, triumphantly exclaimed, “We have embarked on a path and a goal that nobody ever achieved—to come up with a vaccine within a year.”
As a researcher, I beg to differ with that last assessment.
Don’t get me wrong. The Pfizer vaccine, developed by the German drug maker BioNTech, has helped change the course of the deadliest health emergency in our history. But there is no way the development of this vaccine, or the Moderna vaccine I received, took only one year.
As Times writer David Gelles reported on Nov. 10, BioNTech researchers have spent years studying mRNA technology—the “secret sauce” of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. In fact, BioNTech co-owner Dr. Ugar Sahin told infectious disease experts as early as 2018 that he thought his company could use what it had learned about mRNA to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.
Keep in mind that Sahin made that prediction before COVID-19 even existed. But when reports of the coronavirus started showing up in medical journals in January 2020, Sahin and his team were ready for it.
And being ready is the name of the game in research.
It goes without saying that we’re not developing vaccines at the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston. But I still relate strongly to the prescient nature of BioNTech’s work. The company’s researchers displayed a dogged determination to work nonstop, over many years, on a technology they believed held great value for the world—even before the world knew it needed that technology.
At the LTSS Center, we often feel the same way. For example, we’ve been working for decades on research to strengthen the workforce in the field of long-term services and supports (LTSS). We began that work with the encouragement of LeadingAge members who faced very real workforce challenges and asked for our help to address those challenges.
It’s been a long, sometimes hard, road, believe me. But over the years, we’ve learned that there are three prerequisites for researching topics, like workforce, that you care deeply about. To be successful, you need:
- Patience. Research takes time. Significant findings—the kind that have the potential to improve lives—don’t just appear overnight. It requires really hard work to uncover those findings, evaluate them, test them, and translate them into policy and practice.
- Perseverance. Even the best researchers get frustrated and discouraged from time to time. But we must do our best to keep on going—even when the intended beneficiaries of our work don’t yet fully recognize its value.
- Faith. If your research agenda aligns with pressing issues in your field, like the LTSS Center’s does, you have to believe that your work will eventually gain traction. A healthy dose of faith will make it much more likely that you’ll be ready, with a solid evidence base and workable solutions, when the time is right and providers and policymakers are ready to listen.
The LTSS Center met all three of these prerequisites during our years studying worker shortages in the LTSS field, documenting recruitment and retention challenges, and exploring solutions to those challenges, including fair compensation and robust training. So, we were ready when COVID-19 focused new attention both on the value of professional caregivers in the LTSS field and also on the challenges these caregivers face every day—on the job and in their personal lives.
Our investment of time and energy showed signs of bearing fruit in March when the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan cited our study, “Making Care Work Pay” to justify several of the plan’s workforce proposals. Our study demonstrated that raising wages for direct care professionals to at least a living wage in their states of residence would offer tangible benefits to workers, providers, care recipients, public benefits programs, and the communities in which caregivers live.
We’re proud of our research and of the White House’s citation. But, even more, we’re excited about the possibility that our decades of work could bring about needed changes in the way our nation supports the personal care aides, home care aides, and nursing assistants who represent the backbone of our system to support Americans as they age.
Policymakers are finally listening. And we’ll continue providing them with the evidence-based information they need to bring about lasting change.
Robyn I. Stone, DrPH, is senior vice president of research at LeadingAge, and co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston. Her widely published work addresses long-term care policy and quality, chronic care for people with disabilities, the aging services workforce, affordable senior housing, and family caregiving.