Kenneth Bence

speaker

245 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 19 Jun

Kenneth Bence’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Health Chatter · Disabilities Research & Policy with Kenneth Bence · 19 Jun 2026 podcast

compensated, minimally compensated workforce.

So there's a lot of turnover and it puts a lot of strain on the provider organizations that are doing this work to maintain that.

And as the gap between other types of employment and doing this kind of work becomes larger, it gets harder and harder to them to maintain that workforce.

So we do a survey of our members every year and sort of track some of those statistics and compare it to national trends.

We saw in our last survey that for what we call the direct support professionals, those who are working directly with the people who are with disabilities, we found a turnover rate among our providers of 51.5%.

And that was an upward trend from previous years.

So that's a huge amount of turnover.

The other statistics that we track is the vacancy rate.

And the vacancy rate in our last survey was 11.4%, which was on a downward trend.

So you see, it was interesting to see turnover rates increasing and vacancy rates decreasing, which means it's just a constant rotating door.

So the positions are being filled, but the turnover is very high.

From a

from the perspective of a person with disabilities, that means their caregivers are not stable and consistent.

They're getting constantly a new person to support them and their needs can be very, um, extensive, very personal.

Um, and you know, to, to have that amount of vulnerability and constantly have new people coming in and having to be a caretaker, it must, you know, I think it can be very frustrating and, and, um,

difficult from the person's perspective.

These direct support workers, we have an average wage between $18 and $19 an hour for this really sensitive kinds of work that they're doing.

And so it's really considered an entry-level role with very little barriers to entry.

And yet the responsibility and the kinds of work that they do

really intensive.

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