Peter Murphy Lewis was at Ohio Manor in Ripley, filming residents decorating Valentine’s Day trees, when a woman who had moved in recently took him aside off camera. She was from Kentucky. She had not wanted to come. She had assumed she was going there to die. Then she told him it was the only place she would ever want to live, and that it was her home. “This is where people love me,” she said. He still remembers her face.
That story sits in the middle of episode 172 of Compassion & Courage, Marcus Engel’s podcast on compassionate communication in healthcare. Engel had two guests: Erin Hart, strategy director at the Ohio Health Care Association, and Peter, the filmmaker behind People Worth Caring About, the caregiver documentary series the two of them built together across Nebraska, Ohio and, as Peter puts it, a couple of other states now.
It was billed as a conversation about a documentary. It turned into a conversation about hiring. Long-term care is short of people, and both guests keep arriving at the same explanation: the public has only ever been shown the worst of the sector, so nobody applies. The episode is 30 minutes of the other evidence, and of what a state association does with it once it has been filmed. Our article on the People Worth Caring About podcast picks up where this conversation leaves off.
Key Takeaways
1. The staff doing most of the hands-on care are the ones almost nobody films
Hart draws the line clearly. In Ohio, she says on the episode, certified nursing assistants have “probably 75 to 80 percent of their hands-on one-on-one interaction with our residents every day,” while registered nurses are largely administrative, running assessments and directing nursing. That is the inverse of a hospital, and it is why the camera has to point somewhere unfamiliar. If you want to show what care in a nursing facility actually feels like, you film the CNA and the LPN, not the person with the most letters after their name.
2. Joy is the part of long-term care that never makes the news
Hart’s answer on surprises is a Super Bowl party in Cleveland, shot on the day of the game. Residents were dancing, playing games and drinking beer, and the people pouring the drinks were the food service manager and a floor supervisor who was herself 72. In the organization she used to work for, she says, the most popular buildings were the ones with pubs. Engel keeps returning to the same word: “joy is not something I think most people think of whenever you think nursing facility.”
3. Residents recruit better than any job ad
At the Manor in Perrysburg, Peter met a woman who ran the main l