Two years before Peter Murphy Lewis met them on camera outside Cincinnati, Katie and Mary were handing out twelve-inch sandwiches at Subway. When he asked the sisters, both still in their mid-twenties, how much longer they planned to stay in long-term care, they told him they would stay as long as they could until somebody fired them. They had also already picked out their beds in the building.
That story arrives about twenty minutes into episode 84 of the Caregiver Relief Podcast, where host Diane Carbo, a registered nurse of more than fifty years, sat down with Peter and with Erin Hart of the Ohio Health Care Association. The billing was the docuseries People Worth Caring About. What the conversation actually turned into was a working account of how a state association turned unscripted footage into a recruitment, budget and classroom instrument.
The detail is what makes it useful. Erin’s association has more than 600 nursing facility members and collects around 125 caregiver award nominations a year, which is where the cast came from. The Ohio season was agreed on 1 November and filming by 12 February. Since then the clips have gone to state legislators during budget season, into HR onboarding handbooks, and into high school and middle school career talks. For more on this, see our article on the docuseries launch announcement.
Key Takeaways
1. Long-term care’s staffing crisis is a perception crisis first
Erin Hart traces the whole project back to COVID. “In one of our buildings, we lost 35 residents in one building,” she says, and the damage did not end with the losses. The association could not hire into the gap, because of what the public now pictured when it heard the words nursing home. “We had to start changing the narrative that people had about us,” she says. Her argument on the episode is that pay and ratios sit downstream of that picture. Until the picture moves, the applications do not come.
2. The film is aimed at the teenager choosing between Walmart and a care home
Peter is unusually blunt about who the series is for. “I made this docuseries with people like Ohio caregivers so that we can steal young teenagers who are thinking about working at Walmart and have them come in and take care of America’s seniors,” he says. He frames it as a fair trade rather than a rescue mission. The work is hard, he says on the episode, but it is rewarding in a way retail rarely is, and not telling young people that costs them as much as it costs the sector.
3. Nothing was scripted, and that constraint is the method
Asked what separates this from a recruitment video, Erin does not hesitate. “It’s 100% real,” she says. “There was no scripting, there was no prep work really. We just came, we showed up, and we followed them around.” The range was deliberate too. One location was a home for people with developmental disabilities, filmed alongside a 200-bed facility built ten years earlier, so the season shows what the field actually contains rather than one flattering version of it.
4. Casting looked for love of residents, not reliability
The longest part of the process was narrowing about 125 award nominations down to a final eight, plus one backup that was needed after an outbreak closed a facility. Erin was not looking for a dependable employee who, as she puts it, comes to work and helps cover shifts and is nice to everyone. She was looking for “that resident connection” and for caregivers who love the people they serve. Everyone shortlisted was interviewed first to check they were comfortable on camera. Erin credits Valentina, the series director, for holding it together.
5. Documentary is where opinions change, and Peter has the premiere to prove it
Peter cites Ken Burns, who he heard on a podcast saying that documentary is the one place you can hold complexity and contradiction together and still change someone’s opinion. His evidence is the Ohio premiere in a downtown Columbus theater. An important decision maker in healthcare sat in the row in front of him, doubled over laughing at the residents reacting to themselves on screen. “I could see the light of the big screen on his eyes and he was crying and laughing at the exact same time,” Peter says.
6. One season produced a legislative tool, an HR tool and a classroom tool
Ohio did not stop at a screening. The premiere invited the ombudsman office, the department of health and the department of developmental disabilities, giving regulators what Erin calls a front-stage view of the work that does not involve a complaint. During the state budget the association sent social media clips to legislators while lobbying them. A workforce committee