By Randy Wolfe, member, American Association for Homecare
During the last few years, our industry has been learning new ways to tell our story about home care, HME and the value and protection we provide for our patients. With our industry's new focus on public relations, communications and advocacy for our patients, we have been able to shift the emphasis of our public discussions to the homes of families and the patients we care for across the country.
Millions are affected by home care and many millions more will be greatly affected even more for the better or worse by what happens to home care in the next few years. For many, home care is a part of the American dream: staying in your own home, being together among family and friends, being independent, caring for those you love. Without it, many would find their lives a nightmare, separated from their family, losing their home and living in a remote nursing home on the other side of town 25 miles from everything they know.
It's not exaggeration. The stakes are that high. The US government and private industry is completely unprepared to build and finance all of the nursing home facilities that would be needed to meet the long-term care needs of the aging baby boomer generation. In addition, baby boomers by all reports are financially unprepared to finance their own long-term care needs. Without promoting home care, which is the lowest-cost, most patient-preferred solution for long-term care, there may be no solutions to meet their needs.
To these patients and families, home care represents more than a service business or host of medical products covered by their insurance. Home care is the vehicle that can keep their American dream alive and their hopes alive.
The American Association for Homecare's Stand Up For Home Care program, which began to build momentum three years ago as an industry advocacy and PR management initiative, is helping our industry present a more meaningful and compelling message about home care and HME to Washington, the general public and the various media groups across the country. New focus has been given to better handle our mass media messages, including more advance planning, quicker responses and more pointed positions that refute or clarify incorrect or negative generalizations that may come though the press from time to time.
Because of the fundraising success of Stand Up For Home Care, we have been able to extend our contract with Rational 360, the Washington, D.C., PR firm. We have also been able to provide additional resources and administrative support to several teams of industry leaders with strong communications and strategy skills from a cross-section of our industry who volunteer time in this work.
Part of this group's work recently has included taking on the development of a national grassroots sub-organization that will be able to take our message and mission and spread it more widely to our local communities, the constituent base and the home care beneficiary — and then transfer the telling of our message from us to them.
This goal very simply is to organize, support and enable others to Stand up For Home Care and to have others leverage this cause to Congress. If we are successful, our industry advocates who work together with AAHomecare, various buying groups, supporting manufacturers and other similar industry organizations will go from having industry volunteers and supporters counted in the hundreds to a group one day that can be counted in the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands.
To do this, we will need individual industry leaders who recognize our need for adding the political leverage of tens of thousands of additional home care allies and advocates into the work of preserving this industry's future and strengthening its role in the American health care system. We are now in the process of recruiting and enlisting such industry leaders in the category of advocates for local congressional district leadership roles and super-advocates for more regional and national roles in this new endeavor.
As we go forward, we hope to achieve the long-needed critical mass that can provide the leverage needed to gain congressional attention and win support for home care and a long-term care solution that makes sense for America.
AAHomecare's Stand Up for Home Care fundraising reception will be held Monday, Nov. 15, at 6 p.m. at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. For additional information and tickets, visit www.aahomecare.org.
Randy Wolfe is president of Lambert's Health Care, Knoxville, Tenn., and chairman of the volunteer steering committee that guides AAHomecare's Stand Up for Home Care campaign. For information, contact Wolfe at rwolfe@lambertshc.com.