Peter Murphy Lewis walked into a resident’s room at a facility in Albuquerque and told the man his room looked immaculate. The reply came back without a pause: “This is my home.” Kevin went on to say he loved it there, that the staff and residents were his family and his friends. That exchange is what Peter reaches for when the host asks him, near the end, what a better long-term care system would actually look like.
Christopher Coney hosts Straight Outta Health IT, and he sets up the episode with the structural picture: underfunded facilities, a shrinking workforce, low caregiver wages, and a population aging faster than the system can absorb. The conversation then turns away from policy almost immediately. Peter says plainly that he does not feel competent to argue the macro case, and instead spends the next half hour on something the macro case tends to skip, which is why Americans avoid long-term care in the first place.
What makes this worth a listen is the reversal at its center. Peter’s documentary, People Worth Caring About, began as a staffing campaign for one state and turned into an argument about perception. Twenty-one episodes and three seasons later, his claim is that the sector cannot recruit, fund or fill its buildings until the public stops being frightened of them. For anyone who staffs, markets or invests in elder care, that reframing is the useful part. There is a written companion to this episode in our article on seven nursing homes in seven days.
Key Takeaways
1. Fear of Aging, Death and Dementia Is Why the Sector Gets Blamed
Coney asks for a snapshot of what is broken. Peter declines the macro answer and starts somewhere more personal: “we in the United States are afraid of aging, we’re afraid of death, and we’re also afraid of dementia.” His argument is that those three fears make avoidance feel rational, and avoidance makes blame easy. If you never set foot in a nursing home, you are free to assume it is dirty, ugly and poorly staffed. That assumption then gives politicians cover to leave the sector underfunded, which produces the staffing crisis everyone complains about.
2. The Documentary Started as a Staffing Campaign and Outgrew It
The project began about two years before this recording with a narrow brief. The first objective, Peter says, was “simple. To help with the workforce shortage” in Nebraska, built alongside the Nebraska Health Care Association and its president and CEO, Jaylene Carpenter. The question was how to show young people that the work is worth doing. It has since grown to 21 filmed episodes across three seasons, and the goal has widened to changing how the public sees long-term care nationally. He says the team has applied to place it with Amazon Prime and Netflix.
3. Rural Closures Cost Families Their Daily Visits, Not Just Their Beds
The part Peter says he is most concerned about is not perception but rural closures. He is from a town of 2,000 people, and the nursing home where his grandparents died has since shut. He frames the consequence in family terms rather than bed counts: had it closed sooner, “my father would not have been able to have breakfast and lunch with them seven days a week.” He expects the same math to catch up with him, with the nearest facility likely to be well over twenty or thirty minutes from where he now lives.
4. Consolidation Has Priced Out the Single-Facility Owner
Asked why supply is shrinking while demand climbs, Peter names staffing first and consolidation second. Costs have risen to the point that, as he puts it, “you can’t be a one facility owner.” The model now needs upwards of five buildings to spread the overhead. Compliance, executives, a director of nursing, administrators and an attorney all have to be paid for, and he is blunt that being sued is a when rather than an if. A mom-and-pop facility that worked twenty or thirty years ago cannot carry that load.
5. Good Opinions Come From Caregivers, Bad Ones Come From National Media
The most actionable thing Peter cites is a report he saw presented at the LTC100 convention. He says on the episode that a large share of Americans who hold a positive view of long-term care formed it through direct experience with caregivers, while most of those holding a negative view took it from national media. He treats the split as an opening rather than a defeat: “by focusing on the caregiver, that’s how we can change the perception.” With legacy media losing its grip, he argues the correction can be made on YouTube, TikTok and Facebook.
6. The Words Nursing Home Should Be Reclaimed, Not Replaced
Peter’s non-negotiable is language, but not in the way the industry usually means it. He is unconvinced by the search for a softer term than nursing home. “I think we need to own it,” he says. “Let’s change what that means.” The argument runs back through Kevin, whose room was spotless and who called the place his home. Peter points out that nobody would walk into a stranger’s house and insult it, and the residents who live in these buildings are owed the same courtesy. Rename nothing; change the thing itself.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: What turned a filmmaker into an advocate for long-term care?
A: Peter moved to South America at 24, stayed fifteen years, and came back to the United States in 2019. Just before leaving he had helped his grandparents into assisted living and memory care, and his father visited them almost daily in his absence. The documentary began as a thank-you to the CNAs who looked after them.
Q: What did you set out to uncover by making this documentary?
A: Staffing, at first. The brief was to show young people how important the work is and to blunt Nebraska’s shortage. Three seasons in, Peter says the objective has grown into shifting the public perception of long-term care and nursing homes across the country.
Q: Why are hospitals and larger health systems not moving into this space?
A: Peter calls it an educated guess and points at margins. Medicaid and Medicare pay rates, he says, are not strong enough to attract the multi-million and billion-dollar investments available elsewhere. Real estate money still comes in, but less than it used to, and most capital goes to acute care.
Q: Is technology actually arriving in post-acute care?
A: More than it was. At LTC100 he met an American who was bringing three European hardware and robotics products for rehab into the US post-acute market, adapted from acute settings. Peter says it was the first arrangement of that kind he had come across.
Q: Where should people go if they want to support the work?
A: The People Worth Caring About site and its YouTube channel, where he asks people to watch, subscribe and comment. His bigger request is to pass it along to a 14-year-old in Kansas who could become a CNA, or an 18-year-old in Ohio who could become an STNA.
What This Means for Long-Term Care Operators and Marketers
The recruitment claim in this episode is worth testing against your own building. Peter says the facilities he has filmed in do not have the staffing crisis they had three years ago, and that they got there without raising the pay rate above what retail offers. What they did instead was word of mouth from their own caregivers, volunteer programs that bring high schoolers in before they have to commit, and an honest pitch about the intangibles of the work.
That points at an asset most operators already own and never use. Across 21 facilities Peter interviewed at least three caregivers apiece, which is over sixty people on camera, and it is those interviews rather than the b-roll of hallways that move opinion. If you want to see what that looks like as a finished body of work, the People Worth Caring About docuseries is the reference point, and it is the format that has been traveling.
The other thing this conversation exposes is how much genuine differentiation goes untold. Peter describes an Albuquerque campus built by a family of Indian immigrants who started with a Montessori school and then put assisted living next door, so three and four year olds cross over daily and memory care residents are folded into everything rather than kept apart. He describes a Gallup facility, eighty percent Navajo, where a rehab therapist recruited from the Philippines fourteen years ago learned Navajo and will not work anywhere else. Nobody outside those buildings knows. Strategic Pete’s senior living marketing work exists for that gap.
Finally, run a language audit. Peter’s non-negotiable is that residents get to be proud of where they live, and marketing copy that calls a home a facility works against that every time it is published. Willie has worked in the same Albuquerque building for three decades alongside his wife, his daughter and his son; the administrator, Troy, is eighty and refuses to retire. Peter’s challenge is to name anywhere else within five miles where a hundred years of one family’s working life sits in a place they call home. Say that, and the perception problem starts to move.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation is from Straight Outta Health IT, hosted by Christopher Coney, published on 16 June 2025. Coney frames the whole episode around dignity rather than software, and he pushes Peter on policy, rural closures and technology without letting the human thread drop. Listen to the full episode, People Worth Caring About: The Truth About Long-Term Care.
