Commentary: Time Again to Stand Up for Home Care

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 [email protected].