Future Leader: Vincent Amazona, Specialized Trainer, Care Indeed

The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of senior housing, skilled nursing, home health and hospice care. To see this year’s future leaders, visit Future Leaders online.

Vincent Amazona — specialized trainer for Menlo Park, California-based Care Indeed — has been named a 2020 Future Leader by Home Health Care News parent company Aging Media Network.

Future Leaders are high-performing, passionate employees nominated by their peers. Candidates must be 40 or younger and put vision into action while also advocating for seniors and their caregivers.

Amazona sat down with HHCN to talk about his leadership style and the future of home-based care.

HHCN: Can you tell me a little bit about your current organization and role?

Amazona: I work for Care Indeed. We’re a home care and home health service provider in the Bay Area. We serve the whole Bay Area, including the East Bay and Silicon Valley.

Our founders, Dee Bustos and Vanessa Valerio, wanted to start a company that was a great place for caregivers and nurses. They wanted to have a good working environment and build an organization that could service the aging community and memory care community with quality caregivers.

I started working with them about two and a half years ago. My current role is specialist trainer. There was a need for being able to share information and instruct our employees on specialized plans of care. I’ve been developing those for about a year and a half now. My work involves figuring out new ways to introduce this information, so I’ve been helping the caregivers and nurses develop all kinds of programs in more engaging and exciting ways. One example of this was our VR program. We’re now launching our second iteration of that program.

What drew you to this industry?

Growing up around it was one of my big influences. My mom would have to pick me up from school and then wait for my dad to come to pick me up. While waiting, I was around nurses, helping pass out mail to some of my mom’s patients.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I’ve always been under the belief that without a team, there’s no one to lead. It’s just an individual that’s on a mission. From the top-down, if someone chooses to lead, they have to be able to get on a level with every member of their team. It’s not necessarily a hierarchy, but it’s admitting there are people that have certain skills that you may not have and vice versa. I look at it as a partnership. Everyone brings in his or her special talent or skill set, and we move forward together.

What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?

The biggest lesson is that you’re always going to take part of someone with you. It adds to the color of your career.

You always need to have a level of respect for everyone you come across. Much like any service industry, our clients come to us because they’re in need. That has to be treated with a level of respect. That person always has to be given a level of dignity for the life that they’ve led and for who they still are. That’s always been my biggest lesson.

If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home-based care, what would it be?

Having been through quarantine, I would like to see more subsidization programs for seniors to age in place. I’m not trying to draw lines in the sand, but I believe being in a home setting with loved ones is a very important factor when it comes to healing and convalescence. I’d like to see more public participation in making this happen.

What do you foresee as being different about the in-home care industry — looking ahead to 2021?

I really see the adaptability of home care coming into play with more people having to work from home.

Logic may dictate that someone’s there and that automatically means someone is present to take care of a senior. That’s not necessarily true. Given that aspect, I want to see efforts to make our services more readily available.

In a word, how would you describe the future of home-based care?

I’m going to go with “promising.” Not only does it look towards the future, but it also invokes hope.

To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit the Future Leaders homepage.

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