Arizona will soon need many more caregivers. Are we ready?

My grandfather and great-grandfather built the East Valley’s first 55+ active adult community back in 1958. My father continued the family tradition and spent his career developing more than 10,000 homes in those same communities. I grew up around this business – literally singing in holiday programs for residents as a kid – before I ever thought I’d be part of it myself.

So, when I started Sunland Home Care 10 years ago, it wasn’t a pivot into a new industry. It was the next chapter of a family business that has spent nearly 70 years caring for Arizona’s seniors. What’s changed since my great-grandfather’s era is the scale of what’s coming.

Arizona’s 65-and-over population is projected to grow 41% by 2030,  the fastest rate of any state in the country. National surveys consistently show that roughly three out of four older adults would rather age in their own homes than move into an assisted living facility. That preference is exactly what home care exists to support, which means the real question isn’t whether demand for caregivers is coming. It’s already here, and it’s about to get much bigger.

Most families don’t think about who’s going to provide that care until they’re in the middle of a crisis — a fall, a life-threatening medical diagnosis, a spouse who is suddenly left to manage alone. At that point, they’re not evaluating an industry; they’re making an urgent decision about someone they love, often with very little information. That’s the gap I think about most: not just whether there will be enough caregivers, but whether families will know how to tell a well-run agency from one that isn’t.

That’s why Arizona In-Home Care Association (AZNHA) was created. I volunteer on its board alongside other in-home care agency owners who’ve chosen to hold ourselves to standards beyond what’s legally required, such as background checks, training requirements, insurance minimums, and an ethics process. This gives families a way to evaluate a provider before they bring someone into their home. It’s a voluntary standard, built by people in the industry who’d rather set the bar ourselves than wait for a crisis to force the conversation.

Self-regulation only works if enough of the industry participates, and if the families who need this care know where to look. That’s on us as an industry: make what we do more visible through referral partners, healthcare systems, and discharge planners, and through easy-to-understand information families can find before they’re in a crisis, not during one.

The bigger piece is workforce. Arizona will need tens of thousands more caregivers over the next decade. Being a caregiver is a hard job. It’s physically demanding, often low-wage relative to its responsibility, and easy to overlook until your own family needs it. Every serious conversation about Arizona’s aging population has to include how we recruit, train, and retain the people who will actually do this work, because credentials on paper don’t matter if there aren’t enough hands to provide the care.

Arizona doesn’t need a crisis to force this conversation. We can see the wave coming years in advance, which gives us the rare chance to prepare instead of reacting once it’s already broken something.

I’ve spent my career, and my family has spent three generations, betting that the answer to “who takes care of Mom and Dad” shouldn’t come down to luck. Arizona has a few years before this wave arrives in full. That’s enough time to prepare by starting with an honest look at whether we have the workforce and standards to meet a moment we can already see coming.

Traci Beagley is the founder and CEO of Sunland Home Care in Mesa and a volunteer board member of the Arizona In-Home Care Association (AZNHA).