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 https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.
Todd Austin, president of HCP, has been named a 2022 Future Leader by Home Health Care News.
To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40 years old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.
Austin sat down with HHCN to talk about the tragedy that drew him to home-based care, employment quality measures and where he’d like to see the industry go moving forward.
HHCN: What drew you to this industry?
Austin: I think I had a unique draw to the post-acute health care industry specifically.
My older brother and my mom were in a car wreck. And we had home health, hospice nurses and caregivers in our home, almost my entire youth until I was 10 years old. And my brother was 16 when he passed away. So I got to experience what those workers do firsthand, and had some really phenomenal experiences, both when my brother was towards the end of life, but also along the way.
Just seeing how much compassion they can have for someone, but also the impact they have on a family. I think it’s the item that is the least talked about in our space. And that’s what drew me here was being able to help elevate and highlight all of our health care heroes. And I just have a huge passion for where we’re going. The last couple of years has been phenomenal from the standpoint of care being more centered around the patient at home. And that’s the area that I hope to continue to impact going forward.
It’s definitely always a tragedy to lose a family member, but I can’t imagine doing it alone without those home health nurses and caregivers. One caregiver, to this day, I get a Christmas present from her. This was almost 30 years ago, and I still get a Christmas present from from my gal named Barbara every year.
And I remember as a small child, although their primary care was over my brother, they also cared for myself and my brother. So there were three of us. One was wheelchair bound, bed bound and permanently brain damaged. But me and my other brother, they would play with us all the time – puzzles, coloring books, throwing the football, shooting the basketball. They were involved in our lives, not just involved in in my brother’s life.
So although it’s a tragedy to always lose a family member, the impact that they had to be able to navigate that time of loss was was phenomenal. And I hope everybody, at some point, gets to experience end of life, the way that we did.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?
I think my biggest lesson is around empathy. And that everybody has a story.
The biggest lesson I learned is to stop and listen to everybody’s story, and to learn about them. And what I love about this industry is that for the most part, we’re people trying to help people that care about people. And it’s something something that is unique to the health care space.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home-based care, what would it be?
One thing that I believe should continually be changed in the interest industry for the future is quality measures and employment quality. Reimbursement needs to factor that in. There’s a lot of great employers out there, and we just need to continue to highlight those, because that’s what’s going to attract individuals back to our industry or new individuals to our industry.
I think it’s important that quality measures are not just around the patient, but they’re also around the employees and the administrative team. By putting a dual focus on happy employees, nurses and administrators, we know we can improve patient outcomes, but we need to start thinking about the employee outcomes too.
What do you foresee as being different about the home-based care industry looking ahead to 2023?
Specifically to 2023, I think we’ll continue to see unification between all the different lines of business. I think we’ll start to view it as not post-acute care, but home-based care services, and that’ll elevate the experience across the board, whether someone is coming in at point of care for basic ADLs or if they’re going through end of life, and all of the cycles in between.
What qualities must all future leaders possess?
I think all future leaders need to possess a level of empathy. And it’s a trait that I don’t think can be easily trained or obtained. But it’s molded through experiences. And I think every leader should have a level of empathy, specifically in the space we’re in.
In a word, how would you describe the future of home-based care?
Exciting.
If you could give advice to yourself looking back to your first day in the industry, what would it be and why?
My advice at that point would be, ”Slow down, and continually enjoy the journey that you’re on, the people around you and all of the other leaders inside the space.’
I know we’re all dedicated to solving future problems. But at the same time, we’ve come a really long ways.
In the last two years – and in the last five years – the health care and home-based care services space has really grown towards unification. And I think that’s what’s exciting. And it’s going to take everybody working together in a collaborative manner. And I think we’d be further ahead if we took that approach, like we did in the midst of COVID-19. There was a high level of collaboration.
And if I could go back to my first day, I would love to drive a high level of collaboration, and slow down.