2007 National Home Health Aide Survey

What is the National Home Health Aide Survey?

The National Home Health Aide Survey (NHHAS), the first national probability survey of home health aides, was designed to provide national estimates of home health aides employed by agencies that provide home health and/or hospice care. NHHAS was sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). NHHAS, a multistage probability sample survey, was conducted as a supplement to the 2007 NHHCS. Agencies providing home health and/or hospice care were sampled into NHHCS, and then up to six home health aides were sampled from eligible participating NHHCS agencies. Home health aides were considered eligible to participate in NHHAS if they were

1. directly employed by the sampled agency; and
2. provided assistance in activities of daily living (ADLs), including bathing, dressing, transferring, eating, and toileting.

NHHAS was administered to aides during their nonworking hours by interviewers who used a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system to collect the data. The survey instrument included sections on recruitment, training, job history, family life, management and supervision, client relations, organizational commitment and job satisfaction, workplace environment, work-related injuries, and demographics. The NHHAS questionnaire was virtually identical to the survey instrument used in the 2004 National Nursing Assistant Survey of certified nursing assistants working in nursing homes, to permit comparisons of direct care workers across long-term care workplace settings. Minor changes were made to account for differences in workplace environment and responsibilities between home health aides and certified nursing assistants. A total of 3,377 interviews of aides working in agencies providing home health and/or hospice care were completed between September 2007 and April 2008. A detailed methods report on the 2007 NHHAS will be available in the near future on the NHHCS website.

Survey Methodology, Documentation, and Data Files

2007
Survey Methodology and Documentation
Questionnaire
Data dictionary
Data files
Publications
An Overview of Home Health Aides: United States, 2007 [PDF – 569 KB]
National Health Statistics Report No. 34.
Design and Operation of the National Home Health Aide Survey: 2007-2008 [PDF – 1.9 MB]
Series 1, No. 49.

Additional NHHAS data available at the Research Data Center (RDC)

The NHHAS public use data file may not include some data collected in the survey. These additional data elements, however, may be accessed through the RDC at the National Center for Health Statistics for approved projects. Detailed information on the RDC process is available at Research Data Center.