The Future of Home Care: Empathy-Driven Success

The Future of Home Care: Empathy-Driven Success

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Dennis Gill: Welcome to CareSmartz360 On Air, a Home Care Podcast. I’m Dennis Gill, a Senior Sales Consultant at Caresmartz.

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Dennis Gill: Today, I am ecstatic to introduce Heather E. McGowan, the dynamic partner at ImpactEleven and a true trailblazer in reshaping leadership for today’s evolving work landscape.

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Dennis Gill: At ImpactEleven their mission is delightfully simple. To empower talented individuals with a powerful message to create transformative impact around the globe.

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Dennis Gill: Every team member started with a dream and a story, and now

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Dennis Gill: through sheer passion and resilience, they have ignited change for millions.

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Dennis Gill: Heather, a best-selling author and a keynote speaker, extraordinaire masterfully blends empathy with innovation, offering practical frameworks that simplify complex challenges.

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Dennis Gill: So, with the knack of crafting vivid metaphors and sparking intrinsic motivation heather invites us to rethink how care, leadership, and success in between.

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Dennis Gill: So, strap in, join the tribe and prepare for a spirited conversation, where empathy, adaptation, and creative disruption lead the way.

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Dennis Gill: so welcome to the Podcast heather.

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Heather McGowan: Hey! There! Thanks so much for having me.

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Dennis Gill: Thank you. No, we’re really grateful. You took all the time today for CareSmartz360 podcast. And our listeners, our viewers they will be really thankful after what we discussed today.

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Dennis Gill: Okay, so straight away, jumping on to the 1st question for you. So how do you envision empathy reshaping the home care landscape over the next decade. And what core principles should guide this transformation.

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Heather McGowan: So first, st we have to recognize where we are. We’re in what I would call an empathy deficit over the last several decades. We’ve seen a decline in empathy. And that’s something we definitely need to reverse. So when you’re looking at the home care industry, you run on connection, you run on trust, and you should be running on empathy.

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Heather McGowan: So one of the things technology can do is make us more aware of our responses. It can nudge us to be more empathetic. We should be hiring people with either the higher levels of empathy or the ability to develop into the desire to develop higher levels of empathy. I, personally had lost. My father and my brother in the last 18 months, had experiences with both home care and facilities, care, and the people who had empathy were outstanding angels who walk among us. Those who didn’t

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Heather McGowan: maybe shouldn’t be in the industry, or maybe should be guided to get in touch with their empathy. So I think it’s an essential. It’s foundational to what you do.

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Dennis Gill: Okay, okay.

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Dennis Gill: and how can home care professionals balance the essential human touch of care with the increasing adoption of technological tools.

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Heather McGowan: Yeah, we tend to think of technology as this sort of cold and calculated thing. And we can either use that or we can be human. What we need to be doing is using technology to be more human. So what we’ve done over the last several decades is we’ve said, oh, we need more people to study stem, whether they go on to advanced degrees or not.

Science, technology, engineering and math. And what we’ve done is we’ve made humans, more machine like

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Heather McGowan: at a time that machines are starting to do more human and human things. So what we need to use technology to do is, you know. Think about it. If you go to use something like open table to make a reservation at a restaurant. Well, opentable starts gathering more and more information, and it says, Well, when Heather goes to a restaurant she likes a quiet corner. When Heather goes to a restaurant she tends to order these things. So I use technology to make the reservation. But when I go into the restaurant to have the experience, it should be elevated from all the data capture they have of my other restaurant experiences.

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Heather McGowan: Now think about the same thing assigned to home care. You’ve got the ability to capture all this data about. Well, this person lives at home. Her son comes to see her 3 times a week. Her husband passed away 6 months ago. It can give somebody just a snapshot of the situation they’re walking into and make them more empathetic by capturing the data that allows them to enter the situation with the individual with the maximum position to make human connection and make a difference.

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Dennis Gill: Completely by your point, completely by your point on that.

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Dennis Gill: So in same thing, just continuation of that. So what role do you see? AI and emerging technologies playing in home care by 2025, as you did? Answer some of the part of that. But how do you predict these innovations will impact both care, delivery and client experience.

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Heather McGowan: The other thing is that you’re seeing it on in terms of healthcare. You’re seeing it on the diagnostic side. So when I speak to like physician groups and large healthcare networks. You’re seeing experiments where the technology can actually make a diagnosis. The technology can look at the data points and say, okay, well, based upon these things. It could be one of 3 things. It’s probably this thing. And the doctor, the clinician starts to pair with that insight. Now I could see that coming into home care where? They say.

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Heather McGowan: you know, we’ve got data that indicates this person fell 2 weeks ago. This person is maybe incontinent. This person is seeming mentally confused. We ought to be testing this person for a uti, because we know that Utis can lead to falls and can lead to confusion. So there are ways that it can use data capture and predictive analytics to help the home care worker. So I think there’s a lot of ways. I think we’ll see more sensors in homes. So we see, okay, there’s a change in

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Heather McGowan: gait pattern recently, and or the person’s getting up more overnight, or the person’s more agitated. Just 24 h ways of capturing data that could be predictive to a fall before it happens, which is really lifesaving, or, you know, a low blood sugar event that might happen, or while there’s an increased risk. For you know, cardiac issues right now because of this person. I think this person’s dehydrated, and I think this person’s doing

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Heather McGowan: so. There’s lots of ways that I think the kind of the smart home integrated with some of the large language model tools that we, you know we have them now on our laptops and our phones. They’ll soon be pervasive, like everything else

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Heather McGowan: it really will help the caregiver have a better handle, because right now the caregiver walks into a situation, and it’s only what they can see, what they can hear what another caregiver might report. They’re really limited into the window of what they could see. But if you see technology starting, becoming more pervasive throughout the home and connected. That’s going to give the caregiver such a better read on the situation. They’re walking into.

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Dennis Gill: Definitely definitely. They will be aware of all the things that have happened there, and not depending upon the previous notes, or whatever mentioned by the previous.

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Heather McGowan: Yep.

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Dennis Gill: Get the point, get the point. And with the rapid evolution of work, dynamics, how can home care institutions stay agile and continue to prioritize empathy amidst change.

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Heather McGowan: I think, being really explicit about it and hiring for it the biggest breakdowns I saw on the personal level. My own family experiences over the last 18 months or 2 years is the outstanding care always came from a very good frontline manager. I think we look at senior people, and we look at what we hire, and that can be a rotating door. It is their direct supervisor that makes the difference. That’s where you should be investing

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Heather McGowan: training dollars. Attention! Your frontline manager has the greatest impact on your frontline, and that’s your brand. That’s your experience. Your customer experience is the frontline and not much else.

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Heather McGowan: So when your customers experience your frontline and much else, put all your resources there to get outstanding, care to your people.

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Dennis Gill: Got it, got it. And just lastly, as we look toward the future, what are the key challenges and opportunities also for home care leaders in driving innovation. While maintaining a focus on empathy, driven success.

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Heather McGowan: Yeah, I think one of the one of your real opportunities is right now. The front line of your home care workers which can be. You know, it could be nurses. It can be nurses, aides, it can be personal care, aides.

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Heather McGowan: is. There’s not a lot of community, and they’re not a lot of pathways. So it tends to be. You know, somebody gets hired into a job. They stay as long, and sometimes you don’t get people into those positions until later, because it’s not something they’re thought of as doing

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Heather McGowan: right out of a training program or right out of university, or for their 1st jobs when it really can be. Actually, my 1st job was working in a nursing home. So it was my 1st job. It was my 1st experience, and it was incredibly impactful in my life, but attracting more people into it, creating pathways. So they see a future.

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Heather McGowan: you know. Okay, if I worked in this, I may not stay in home, care for my whole life, but the things I can learn in home care I might use in pharmaceutical sales later, or I might use in working in a marketing company later, or I might go from here to being a frontline manager or owning a home care organization myself.

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Heather McGowan: The pathways are absolutely unclear. It seems dead end for some of the positions, and that should not be the case. There’s lots of ways to connect to organizations that offer sometimes free or low cost training. So you can go move up into different types of positions from that entry point, creating mentorship. So I say one of the big things we need in organizations is it used to be? You traded your loyalty for security when you got a job, because at one time

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Heather McGowan: you could have a job for life that hasn’t been true for decades. But companies act like I want your loyalty. I want your loyalty with the illusion of security which really isn’t there, and hasn’t been there for a very long time. Instead, I think organizations should be offering what I call the 5, and sometimes 6 m’s. The 1st is money.

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Dennis Gill: People.

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Heather McGowan: Second is mission. This is something that you have a huge opportunity, for in healthcare they are part of something bigger than themselves. It can be end of life care, which is incredibly

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Heather McGowan: an honorable and valuable thing that not very many people get to do. It could be injury, recovery! It could be rehabilitation. But you have a real connection to the person you’re serving which can be hugely motivating. So money, mission, meaningful work you do meaningful work. Remind folks of that. Not everybody gets to do meaningful work. In some cases you’re competing with fast food in terms of

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Heather McGowan: where people could work for you as a personal carrier, or they could work at Mcdonald’s. There’s so much more for many folks in working directly with humans in terms of the return they get that return on meaningful work. After that it’s mentorship. This is really missing, I think in your industry it’s helping people feel ways that they can learn, adapt, find new pathways where they can go from here and then membership. This is also missing, because people are often working in isolation. In some of these instances. If they’re in the home care side.

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Heather McGowan: then they don’t feel like they’re part of a community. There are ways you can make people feel part of a community, and then the last bit which I think you do offer is.

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Heather McGowan: oh, God! I’m drawing a blank on. The word begins with an

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Heather McGowan: I’m sorry I’m drawing a blank, but it’s basically having flexibility.

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Heather McGowan: It’s like balance and having flexibility. And over your job and agency. So I think those are the things that people are looking for from work. So if you can shape more jobs around, you know fair pay, meaningful work being part of something bigger than yourself having mentorship, so money, mission, meaningful mentorship, membership.

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Dennis Gill: So the other 5 pointers that would be really beneficial for our users, for our viewers, that what Heather told us

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Dennis Gill: and thank you, thanks a lot heather for sharing your expertise today. And to just sum up, if you have to just sum up in a couple of lines

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Dennis Gill: just from your side.

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Heather McGowan: We’ve got technology growing at an exponential rate, which means every step forward in technology is double or triple the prior step. So the change rate is much, much faster. That’s giving us greater and greater capabilities. And what we’re doing is we’re getting

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Heather McGowan: focused on what technology is going to replace. And who’s it going to displace? And I think, instead, we should be looking at, how can it amplify human potential? How can it make us better? And we need to lean into our uniquely human skills. Empathy is so important, particularly in the work that you do focus on hiring for empathy, nurturing, empathy, rewarding for empathy and using technology to make you a better human and have better experiences for your patients.

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Dennis Gill: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your expertise in this field. Obviously, empathy. Everybody. Empathy should be treated in a good way everywhere. The way Heather told us, and thank you for sharing your expertise once again, and to our lovely audience. Thanks for tuning in until next time. It’s Dennis Gill, signing off. Thank you.