The failure to create an occupation of direct support with sufficient pay, benefits, training, career trajectories and status to recruit and retain a stable, skilled workforce.
To support these needs a wide range of education, training, and professional collaboration will be necessary.
Although the most common education for a DSP is a high school education, the primary requirement is that a person must be at least 18 years of age. The job itself doesn't require any prior experience. However, a DSP requires hours of training and national certification for three different levels. Currently, certification and training are sponsored by an employer.
Employers provide extensive training beyond new hire orientation with CPR, occupational safety, behavioral management, and patient abuse, neglect, and exploitation. The proper training can be costly. Perhaps more importantly, adherence to government regulations requires adequate reporting, documentation, and training to avoid any injury to the individual being cared for and potential penalties or litigation.
It goes beyond a genuine passion for helping others. The role of a DSP is to assist a person with autism spectrum disorder to live independently. They help individuals with tasks most other people take for granted. They teach individuals to complete tasks to do for themselves, while also minimizing the risk of injury and other hazards.
The most important trait of a DSP is patience. Also, DSPs need compassion, honesty, integrity, composure under pressure, dependability, punctuality and a strong sense of teamwork.
Despite the proper training and the right individual, turnover rates continue to persist within the industry. Wages remain the leading cause of turnover. In Pennsylvania, the annual mean salary is slightly more than the national average, at $22,160. Private care workers, those who are not employed by a government agency, are among the DSPs most impacted by low wages. State DSP workers make about $17.85 per hour, compared to the $10.65 per hour for private DSPs.
In fact, the DSP workforce shows a more significant disparity even by type of service.
Employers hiring practices – they may relax their standards and potentially hire individuals who do not represent their company culture.
Individuals receiving care from different DSPs and losing contact with the staff they've grown to trust and rely upon.
Higher costs for Providers – in addition to hiring, training, and turnover costs, increases in overtime pay are prevalent to cover staff shortages.
More efforts are being made to dive deeper into the DSP crisis. In the Presidents Report, Brandt suggests that there are several practices that would address the workforce crisis. Among some of the more obvious solutions, he cites worker cooperative and independent provider models, competency-based training models that lead to credentialing or certification of staff, and the use of technology-enhanced supports. One such solution is the development of Optonome DSP123. Optonome takes the pressure off the pre- and post-training for providers and gives them the opportunity to spend more time integrating new DSPs into practice.
Optonome is now in the forefront of small-scale solutions, offering big impact. For more information about Optonome or to request a demo, visit https://www.optonome.com.
 Direct Support Compensation Practices. Implications on Service Quality; Tax Dollars and Quality of Life, August 2017, Nicholas D. Torres, M.Ed., Scott Spreat, Ed.D., Michael Clark, M.P.A.
 Report to the President 2017. America's Direct Support Workforce Crisis: Effects on People with Intellectual Disabilities, Families, Communities and the U.S. Economy, President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities.