Dr. Susan Wehry gives a keynote address during a long-term care conference Tuesday at Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast Inn and Conference Center in Hallowell. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

HALLOWELL — Several dozen long-term direct healthcare workers attended a conference in Hallowell on Tuesday to discuss how to raise wages and combat high turnover rates in the field.

The organizers of the event, the Direct Care and Support Professional Advisory Council, hoped to publicize the widespread shortage of long-term direct care workers and find policy solutions to close the coverage gap for older adults and people with disabilities or behavioral health disorders.

Dr. Susan Wehry gives a keynote address during a long-term care conference Tuesday at Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast Inn and Conference Center in Hallowell. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

The council, founded in 2022 and based on similar models in other states, is made up of direct care workers who want to have a voice in policymaking and the future of the field.

Direct care workers is an umbrella term including professionals who provide services and support to patients in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and, increasingly, at home. Nearly 90 of these workers attended Tuesday’s inaugural conference.

The event began with a keynote speech from Dr. Susan Wehry, who has been practicing geriatric psychiatry for 40 years and regularly relies on direct care workers to support her patients’ needs. Wehry is the director of AgingME, a geriatrics workforce enhancement program which recently received a five-year, $5 million federal grant to create new “micro-certifications” for specializations in the direct care field, ideally resulting in higher pay standards and higher retention.

“You hear yourselves referred to as ‘essential workers,'” Wehry said. “When there is an emergency and other people stay home, you go to work because you’re essential. It means that you are critical, necessary, vital, indispensable — and we want to make sure that you’re paid accordingly.”

Many patients of direct workers rely on MaineCare — a state health insurance program for low-income residents — to pay medical bills. But low, stagnant MaineCare reimbursement rates and generally low wages have led many workers to leave the profession. Now, the field has a massive shortage of workers.

According to a Maine Center for Economic Policy study published in June, at least 2,300 more long-term care workers are needed across the state to close the coverage gap — not including the workers who may have left for different fields this year. There were 4,400 fewer direct care workers in Maine in 2022 than in 2019. Every week, 23,500 hours of approved at-home care go uncovered for older adults in Maine, largely because of the massive staffing shortage of direct care workers.

Dr. Susan Wehry gives a keynote address during a long-term care conference Tuesday at Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast Inn and Conference Center in Hallowell. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

The shortage has hit the rest of the health care industry, too — about 200 people in Maine who could be discharged to a nursing home are stuck in a hospital because understaffed nursing homes cannot take on more patients, even though nursing home occupancy has dropped by 9% since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Many nursing homes that cannot keep up with staffing shortages are closing. Between 2010 and 2023, 19% of Maine’s nursing homes closed, and at least two more — one in Winthrop and one in Augusta — have closed in Kennebec County this year. Nationwide, that rate was 5%.

About 8,000 workers are out of the Maine workforce to care for an older family member, which cost the state about $1 billion in GDP and reduced state and federal revenue by $70 million in 2022 alone, according to the MECEP report.

“These are folks who are saying on a weekly basis they would love to be in the labor force, active in a job that’s being paid, but they can’t because they have responsibilities to care for an older adult who doesn’t have professional care,” Arthur Phillips, who wrote the MECEP report, said during a panel discussion. “There are also many other people and communities that you serve that are not just older adults, so I think this number would be significantly larger.”

Brenda Gallant, the executive director of the Maine Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, which created the advisory council and Tuesday’s event, said the event was aimed at raising awareness of the issues the profession is having — and even raising awareness of the profession itself.

Wehry said several workers told her before the conference began that they didn’t feel like many people even know what their direct care jobs entailed. Gallant said she was proud of the efforts to introduce new strategies for recruitment and retention — including providing high school counselors with informational booklets about certifications and job opportunities for students.

“We just have to have more innovative ways of reaching out,” Gallant said.