Opinion: My father served our state and our nation. In his final years, a home care worker gave him the dignity he deserved.

My father, Joe Neal, was Nevada’s first Black state senator. He was also an Air Force veteran and a devoted dad who inspired me to become a senator in the legislature myself. When he had a stroke in 2020 during the pandemic, I wanted to make sure he was given the care and dignity that he deserved after a lifetime of service. 

I didn’t want to put him in a nursing home, so with the help of a home care worker, I was able to have my father live at home with me and my daughter. That experience opened my eyes to how absolutely essential home care workers are for supporting Nevada families who are caring for their moms, dads, grandparents, or loved ones with disabilities. And it drove me to work with advocates on a long term effort, which will continue in the 2025 legislative session, to lift up and expand the home care workforce so we can care for our rapidly aging population.

My father’s stroke couldn’t have come at a worse time. COVID was raging in our state and I was riddled with anxiety that he would catch the virus in the hospital. When my daughter and I brought him home, we faced the same vexing question that families across Nevada increasingly struggle with: how on earth are we going to balance the intense demands of caregiving with the challenges of our careers and the rest of our lives?

Thank God we were able to find an amazing home care worker. She was a young, Black woman who came in four days a week, five hours a day. While most people stayed home, she risked her own health to come attend to my father’s well-being. She and her fellow home care workers were truly frontline heroes, but were not properly recognized for it. 

My father’s caregiver changed his bedsheets, helped him with bathing and going to the bathroom, did his laundry, and made sure he was eating. But more than just tending to his physical health, she kept his morale up during a very difficult time. She would actually sit down, talk with him, and listen to him talk about his fascinating life. She made him feel heard, which is something that seniors deeply crave.   

On top of that, she provided caregiving relief to me and my daughter. I was incredibly busy with special legislative sessions and my father’s home care worker allowed me to just take a breather, feed myself, and avoid getting burned out. 

Fortuitously, at that time constituents and advocates approached me about a growing movement to raise up standards for home care workers. I was shocked to learn that average wages for our state’s 13,000 home care workers had been mired at around $11 an hour for a decade, and that funding for the industry had been stagnant for 20 years. 

Poverty wages and underfunding have created a crisis-level workforce shortage just as Nevada’s population is aging—and much faster than the rest of the country. Between 2011 and 2019, the 65 and older population in Nevada increased by 46% and there are now almost half a million seniors living in our state.

I worked with caregivers and their union to design and sponsor Senate Bill 340, which established a first-in-the-nation Home Care Employment Standards Board. The board was a collaborative process that brought together all stakeholders to analyze the home care crisis, including employers, clients, workers, advocates, family members, union representatives, and elected officials. Together, they developed many unanimous recommendations, including setting a minimum wage and expanding state funding. 

Then, caregivers and their union took those recommendations back to Carson City and spoke directly to legislators. Last year, my fellow lawmakers and I passed a historic $16 minimum wage for home care workers and a major funding increase, which Governor Lombardo signed into law. 

Now, we’ve got to continue moving forward with that vital work. As important as the wage increase was, everybody knows that you can’t survive on $16 an hour, especially if you’re raising kids. And Nevada still lags near the bottom for home care funding compared to other states.       

I’m once again working with my colleagues in the legislature to build on our previous policy accomplishments and develop our “Silver State Home Care Standards.” Those proposals include a $20 minimum wage to recruit and retain workers in the profession, greater funding for small businesses, professionalized training to ensure quality care, more service hours for clients, and reduced red tape. 

These policy proposals are urgently needed to make sure we have a robust home care workforce to care for older Nevadans and people with disabilities. I view my work advancing home care policies as part of honoring my father’s legacy. He would have been deeply proud to see the legislature, which he helped lead, uplifting these caregivers who meant so much to him.