A dietitian who had worked at the same Ohio facility for three decades walked Peter Murphy Lewis down a hallway to meet one of her favorite residents. The woman had lived there four years and had never once eaten in the dining hall. Peter worked out why without being told, then asked whether she would come and have lunch with him. She said yes, as a favor to her caregiver.
That moment sits in the middle of episode 192 of Inspired Caring, hosted by Michele Magner. Her guests are Erin Hart, strategy director at the Ohio Health Care Association, and Peter Murphy Lewis, the documentarian behind the People Worth Caring About series. The episode is billed as a celebration of caregivers, and it is one. What it turns into is a working session on language: which words make senior living sound like a place people go to live, and which words keep it sounding like an institution.
The word both guests keep returning to is community. Peter had been in Chicago the week before, speaking on public perception, and he says that was the term the room kept landing on. Erin, who spent seven years in long-term care on the corporate side before joining the state association, describes the same shift from the inside. The last stretch of the conversation is the part most communications teams skip: what happens to the footage after the premiere, and who else it has to persuade.
Key Takeaways
1. Community is the word that does the work, not care
Peter had just come back from speaking in Chicago on how the public sees long-term care, and he says one word kept surfacing. “Community is not something that’s fabricated in senior living or long term care,” he says. “It’s been around for a long time.” He points to small villages in Ohio and in Kansas, where he grew up, and to friends in Chicago and San Francisco who choose a neighborhood so their children will interact and they will know their neighbors. The word already means something to everyone. Senior living messaging rarely makes it the lead.
2. Residents name the fear out loud before they name the relief
The pattern Peter hears on camera and off it is always the same two halves. People tell him they were afraid to move in because they thought they would not know anyone, would be treated badly, would be lonely, or had come there to die. Then comes the second half. “I’m glad that I came here because people love me here. People need me here,” he says he is told. He describes one resident who becomes a big sister to another, and residents who end up looking after their own caregivers.
3. One lunch invitation carries more than a recruitment ad
The dining hall story is the whole argument in miniature. The dietitian had been there thirty years, and the resident had avoided the dining room for four. She came because her caregiver asked. Peter’s reading of it is that caregivers do the clinical work he cannot do and the nutritional work he cannot do, and then also do the social and emotional work most people could do but do not make time for. Everything a viewer fears about aging, he says, “will be broken down when you see this one clip.”
4. Tenure is the credibility argument nobody puts on camera
On the first day of filming in Ripley, Ohio, Peter and the crew counted up the service records of the four women they were working with. Between them they had 120 years in long-term care, in the same small farming community. He turns it into a question anyone can answer: “Would you rather have bread from someone who’s been baking for a month, or from someone who’s been a baker for a decade?” Then he scales it up to the person trusted with your parent’s history and memory. Twelve decades, four caregivers.
5. The executives on camera keep handing the microphone away
Almost every episode opens with a short tour, usually led by an administrator, a director of nursing or a chief executive. Peter says what strikes him is how fast those leaders step aside. The line he keeps hearing is that all they do is “balance the books and hire the right people and then get out of the way.” He describes people entirely comfortable with the face of their organization being a 19-year-old maintenance guy, or a woman in her forties who cleans toilets and would not work anywhere else because of the relationships she has there.
6. Footage has to keep working long after the premiere
Four seasons have been filmed, each one separately, with Kentucky due in about nine months. The Nebraska season has been accepted by two streaming platforms, Ohio is going to film festivals and a Netflix submission, and everything sits on YouTube in the meantime. The reuse that matters most is smaller. Erin cuts short clips for lawmakers so that, without busing anyone to a facility, “we could direct those towards our state legislature and our members to Congress.” She and Peter are also building viewing-party workbooks for students, residents and HR teams.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: Who is the series actually about?
A: Direct care workers. Erin is blunt about it. “It’s not about the people who own the facilities. It’s not about the residents who live there even,” she says. Residents appear because caregivers care for them, but the CNAs, nurses and activities staff carry the story.
Q: Why does this message feel urgent right now?
A: Because the workforce gap never closed after COVID. Erin says on the episode that one Ohio building lost 35 residents in a single month, and staff who had cared for those people for years left. Almost nobody grows up planning to work in a nursing home, so the pipeline did not refill.
Q: What has actually changed inside the buildings?
A: Erin grew up in a village with a nursing facility that was part of local life, and you still knew you were in an institution when you walked in. One place they filmed now reads as a market, with a coffee shop and shutters on the windows. Another gave every resident a bird feeder outside the door.
Q: What is at stake in the Medicaid debate?
A: Erin puts provider reimbursement at about 82 cents on the dollar in this conversation, so every Medicaid resident is carried at a loss. Cut the federal contribution and states cut rates, and she expects closures. The facility in her own village has already shut, and families end up driving much farther to visit.
Q: Where should a new viewer start?
A: On YouTube, searching for People Worth Caring About Ohio. Peter points first to episode seven, filmed in Singleton, where a resident performing as Mississippi Jackson had the room dancing. Then episode two from Covenant Village, with two caregivers under thirty who intend to stay for life.
What This Means for Senior Living Communications Teams
Start with the language audit, because it is free. Most senior living community messaging leads with care levels, amenities and clinical capability, which is exactly the vocabulary that makes a prospective resident hear institution. The word that moved the room in Chicago was community, and both guests treat it as something already present in the buildings rather than something a campaign has to manufacture. If your copy cannot say what a new resident’s first week of friendships looks like, it is describing a service and not a place.
Then find the proof, because community is a claim and claims do not travel. The lunch invitation, the 120 years of service between four women in Ripley, the couple who met in the library and had their nurses stand up at the wedding: none of that survives being summarized. It has to be seen. That is the reasoning behind the People Worth Caring About documentary series, which films direct care workers on ordinary shifts rather than staging testimonials.
Plan the second and third use of the footage before the crew arrives. This episode is unusually candid about the afterlife: YouTube for reach, streaming platforms and festivals for credibility, short cuts for state legislators and members of Congress during funding debates, and workbooks so a local community can host a viewing party for students, residents or staff. One shoot, several audiences, each needing a different edit. Deciding that afterwards is how good footage ends up sitting in a folder.
Finally, be deliberate about who appears. The pattern Peter describes is leaders passing the microphone to frontline staff within minutes, and it reads as confidence rather than modesty. Tenure is your strongest evidence and it belongs on screen, spoken by the people who earned it. If you are weighing what a production like that would involve for your own organization, Strategic Pete’s senior living marketing practice is built around exactly this kind of work.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation aired as episode 192 of Inspired Caring, hosted by Michele Magner, on 6 August 2025, with Erin Hart of the Ohio Health Care Association and Peter Murphy Lewis of Strategic Pete. Listen to the full episode on iHeart.
