2025 ANCOR Report on DSP Workforce Available

October 31, 2025

The 2025 Report on the DSP Workforce Crisis is available for you to look at and to use in conversations with your legislators.  Just leaving a copy with them, or their Aide, is a way to quickly and easily make a statement. 

I did go back and look at several previous reports, while I appreciate ANCOR’s efforts in preparing and publishing this report every year, I do have some concerns about the messaging.  Looking back, for example, at the 2022 report I see the words “workforce crisis” and workforce emergency.   I also see 83% of providers are turning away new referrals (compared to 62% this year) and 63% of providers discontinuing programs (compared to 29% this year).   I am not suggesting the workforce “crisis” is over – far from it.  But I do have two thoughts:

• First, the 2022 report compared data to “pre-pandemic” levels with dramatic impact and, in most discussions now we have stopped talking about “pre-pandemic”  as the benchmark for satisfactory or better.   The pandemic has become yesterday’s news!
• Second, a crisis by definition is an unstable or dangerous period; while the is no specific timeline for how long a crisis can last, there is the assumption that when you are able to manage the conditions on a daily basis it stops being a “crisis” and becomes the new normal.

Perhaps our messaging needs to be the “fragility” of the service system – it would take very little to push any provider to a point where they simply do not have the staff resources to operate at all!