A new Connecticut law will soon require real training for the people we send into our parents' and grandparents' homes. My honest reaction, after thirty years as a nurse: what took us so long?
I've spent most of my life at the bedside — as a floor nurse, then as a Director and Assistant Director of Nursing. I've watched what happens when someone who knows what they're looking at walks into a room, and I've watched what happens when they don't. So forgive me if I don't treat this new law as bureaucratic news. To me it's personal.
What changed, plainly
For years, the words "non-medical home care" carried a quiet, ugly assumption: that because a caregiver isn't a nurse, they don't need to know much of anything. Anyone with a kind face and a free afternoon could be handed a key to a vulnerable person's home.
This year, Connecticut decided that wasn't good enough. Lawmakers passed — and the Governor signed — a requirement that caregivers at homemaker-companion agencies actually be trained. The specifics are sensible and, frankly, modest: at least eight hours of training, new caregivers prepared within their first ninety days, refreshers every couple of years, and — this part I love — the training follows the caregiver from job to job instead of evaporating every time they change employers. The rules phase in starting in 2027, with the state finalizing the approved programs before then.
Eight hours. That's the new floor. It's a good floor. It is nowhere near the ceiling, and no family should mistake one for the other.
Why a few hours of training is never really about a few hours
Here's the thing the law can mandate but can't teach: judgment.
I can show a new caregiver how to help someone in and out of a tub in twenty minutes. What takes longer — what takes a nurse standing beside them — is teaching them to notice. That the grandmother who was sharp yesterday and foggy today probably doesn't have "a touch of old age." She likely has a urinary tract infection, and she needs to be seen today, not next week. That the faint redness over a hip isn't nothing — it's the first whisper of a pressure wound, and what you do in the next forty-eight hours decides whether it becomes a hospital stay. That a man who's suddenly quiet and won't finish his lunch may be telling you something his words can't.
A caregiver who can see those things is worth more than any certificate. A caregiver who can't is a liability dressed up as help — no matter how warm they are.
What this means at Connecticut Caring Companions
I'll be straight with you: this law doesn't change a single thing about how we operate, because we were already well past it.
I didn't build this company and then go looking for the minimum I could get away with. I built it the way a nurse would — which is the only way I know how. Our caregivers are prepared and supervised by Registered Nurses, across exactly the things that matter: helping someone bathe and dress and use the bathroom with skill and dignity; spotting and reporting abuse or neglect; noticing when a person's condition is shifting; and caring for someone whose memory is slipping without making them feel diminished.
We do that because my name and my license are on this. When one of our caregivers walks into your mother's home, they carry thirty years of nursing judgment behind them, whether they realize it or not. That isn't a marketing line. It's just how we were made.
So when the state says, "you must train your people," my answer is: good. We've been doing it all along. Hold every agency to it — including mine.
If you take one thing from this
The next time you're choosing care for someone you love — or, if you're a discharge planner, choosing who to trust with a patient — don't ask whether an agency "meets the new requirement." By 2027, everyone will claim they do.
Ask the real question instead: Who is teaching your caregivers to think, and who is responsible when something goes wrong? If the answer is a binder and a quiz, keep looking. If the answer is a nurse, you're getting somewhere.
That's the standard I'd want for my own mother. It's the only one I was ever willing to build.
— Patrick R. Etienne, RN Founder, Connecticut Caring Companions