Incorporating Paid Caregivers into Medical Education to Enhance Medical Student Exposure to This Essential Workforce

Abstract

The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the utility of home-based health care due in part to social distancing requirements, curtailment of elective hospital procedures, and patient apprehension of the health care setting. The pandemic particularly accentuated the integral role of paid caregivers (eg, home health aides, personal care attendants, and other home care workers) in caring for patients with chronic health conditions. Given the paradigm shift toward community- and value-based health care models, paid caregivers are likely to play an even greater role as care team members. Despite the increasingly prominent role paid caregivers are assuming in health care, especially for patients who are chronically ill, in our experience as medical students, we have very little exposure to these care team members, with most interactions occurring in brief, chance encounters. Specifically, we advocate for increased medical student exposure to paid caregivers to facilitate their recognition as valuable care team members. We propose to achieve this through (1) classroom-based module learning with live paid caregivers and (2) plain language communication training to enhance reciprocal engagement.