The activities director at a nursing home outside Cincinnati went out to buy a sandwich and came back with two new employees. Peter Murphy Lewis tells the story on this episode of Fading Memories. Two sisters, 22 and 25, were working at Subway, and she recruited them because she knew they were, as he puts it, “the nicest people in the world” and wanted to take the joy they were bringing to sandwiches and deliver it to American seniors. A year later he was interviewing them at Covenant Village and they told him they would not work anywhere else.
Host Jen Fink has run Fading Memories for almost eight years for families navigating dementia, and she opens by admitting that family caregivers rarely get to see the other side of the job. She is joined by Peter and by Erin Hart of the Ohio Healthcare Association, who worked in long-term care for about seven years before moving to the association. Erin heard about the docuseries from the Nebraska association, found Peter on LinkedIn, and had her own state’s episodes filmed within three months.
What the conversation turns into is an argument about stigma rather than staffing. Erin calls the industry’s image “a PR problem for lack of a better word” and says it actively hurts recruiting. Peter argues the same stigma sits on family caregivers at home, who tell themselves what they do is ordinary. Both of them think the fix is showing people what the work actually looks like, which is what People Worth Caring About was built to do. Our article on the docuseries shaking up long-term care picks up where this conversation leaves off.
Key Takeaways
1. Peter went in carrying the stereotype himself, and the series broke it
He is direct about his own starting point. He says he is drawn to subjects he holds a strong opinion about or knows nothing about, and the long-term care stereotype he arrived with was middle-aged women caring for 90-year-old women “who go there to die.” The Covenant Village sisters ended that. So did a resident he calls Mississippi Jackson, who sang karaoke while the crew danced. “We humans, I include myself, feel comfortable living in a black and white truth,” he says, “and it’s nowhere close to the truth.”
2. Two sisters left Subway for a nursing home and say they are never leaving
The Katie and Mary story is the one both guests keep returning to, because it contradicts what people expect to see. Erin says the value is exactly that surprise. People do not expect “to see young women who are working in long-term care, who are very happy enjoying it and saying things like, I will never leave this industry.” Peter says he has now made 21 episodes and interviewed 66 people, and the ones he likes best are the ones where somebody proves him wrong.
3. Staffing is back to pre-pandemic numbers, and that is a low bar
Asked whether anything has shifted, Erin gives the honest version. Headcount has recovered nationwide, “but that’s a low bar, to be sure.” What has not come back is experience. COVID took leaders, nurses who retired, people who burned out and people who died. As she puts it on the episode, the industry has regained physical bodies in the building but not the industry knowledge, and she expects that to take many years to rebuild. Assisted living in Ohio is still short of the demand new construction created.
4. A pub in an assisted living community is not a gimmick, it is normal life
Erin says a pub is a very popular amenity in her members’ communities, and the reason is not novelty. “You don’t stop having a life because you’re old,” she says. One docuseries episode features a nursing facility Super Bowl party with residents drinking beer. Peter adds his grandmother, who kept her daily scotch in memory care and “would prefer to drink a scotch with five people she didn’t recognize, then drink by herself in her room.” The point is normalizing everyday life, not staging it.
5. Ohio put caregiver footage in front of legislators before asking them for anything
This is the part most associations miss. Erin says the Ohio Healthcare Association geofenced the statehouse and ran targeted marketing so legislators saw clips of people working in long-term care before any conversation about a workforce amendment. By the time the ask came, “they have some frame of reference.” She ties it to the governor’s stated goal of Ohio being the greatest place to age, and to the association’s roughly 650 nursing facilities, 350 assisted living communities and several hundred other providers.
6. Pay moves when certification, career paths and reimbursement move together
Asked whether the series can lift wages, Erin says that is part of the goal, but the mechanism is stacked. She describes an Ohio nursing assistant career advancement program funded by grants, where each certification earns a pay bump and CNAs can become preceptors or directors of nursing assistants. She says on the episode that average wages have gone from about $11 an hour pre-pandemic to almost $18 now, and that none of it happens without the Medicaid rate increases advocacy delivered.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: How did the docuseries start?
A: Peter was keynoting at the Nebraska state association and pitched the idea at cocktail hour: stop arguing about staffing and show the intangibles nobody sees. Asked why him, he pointed to ten years of a TV show in the Mike Rowe mould and more than 125 jobs filmed.
Q: Why did an Ohio association want in?
A: Erin heard about it from Nebraska and already knew Peter from a conference podcast. First and foremost the association wanted a recruitment tool to help members talk to students about