Compiling Data of Workforce Policies: A Data Compendium About Direct Care Workers Caring for People With Dementia

Direct care workers in long-term care settings are essential to provide care for older adults and people with disabilities who have daily needs. There is an increasing demand for an adequately sized and well-prepared direct care workforce to support people living with dementia due to its rising prevalence. However, a lack of standardized policies and data leaves researchers and policymakers with little evidence to guide the development and refinement of workforce policies. The National Institute on Aging-funded Advancing Workforce Analysis and Research for Dementia Network is developing a compendium of policies and programs related to the demand, supply, working conditions, and skills of direct care workers, including dementia care-related attributes. For each policy, the compendium provides a description of the policy, an annotated list of related datasets, and a downloadable harmonized dataset with research-ready data. The data compendium is innovative in its organization of data and resources by policy topic. It encompasses a diverse range of sources, including government reports, organizational resources, large datasets, and data collected by researchers, and it can be linked with other data sources. The creation of a crowd-sourced repository of data on state and federal regulations in the United States will facilitate the rapid advancement of research and development for early stage researchers. The data compendium identifies research gaps that can be filled by leveraging these data, which have the potential to inform evidence-based policy and program development related to the long-term care workforce.