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One area of employment where background checks have become increasingly important is healthcare. Because of the vulnerability of many of the patients that medical workers come into contact, employers have to know that their workers can be trusted. Since many people mislead hiring managers by putting inaccurate information on their resumes, conducting these investigations has become the only way to get the truth and protect those who are already going through the difficult time of dealing with an illness.

These are some of the reasons that government officials in Connecticut are pushing for legislation that will require agencies that deal manage home health aides to conduct background checks on every new employ. If this is passed, job seekers that have been convicted of a felony within the last 10 years will not eligible for these positions by law, according to the Hartford Courant. The newspaper also said that data from the Connecticut Association for Home Care Inc. shows that somewhere between 90 to 95 percent of the licensed agencies in the state already investigate their workers.

One of the government officials that are supporting this piece of legislation is Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. According to the Courant, Blumenthal and several others have had members of their families fall victim to home health aides who have taken items from their homes, despite the high occurrence of background checks. As long as some companies don’t handle their employees this way, there will still be incidences like this, which is one of the reason he fully behind passing the rule.



”Home health and homemaker aides are entrusted with profound responsibilities and should be held to powerful standards,” said Blumenthal according to the paper. “A criminal background check for home health aides is not only reasonable, but common sense.”

If this is passed it will apply to all licensed home health care agencies, homemaker companion service agencies and homemaker-home health aide agencies. Currently the legislation is waiting to be heard by several committees. Since this process can take a decent amount of time, it is unknown when or if all such agencies will have to require background checks on new and existing employees.

Tags: Background Checks

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.