June 6, 2020
When I was 14 years old staged a boycott of the local newspaper because of their biases and lack of balance in reporting. I had the same urge when I watched the PBS Frontline video Life and Death in Assisted living. I understand that the public has an insatiable need for the gore and the dramatic but the media has a responsibility to inform the public-but well.
The story was basically an expose of one of the largest providers of assisted living services in the nation—Emeritus; A for profit driven publicly traded company under pressure to make large returns on investments, somewhere around the 40%. To achieve those returns they must cut corners everywhere resulting in the type of negligent episodes we saw in the video. One wonders if organizations dedicated to the safety and welfare of such vulnerable individuals should be profit driven. The story prompts us to think that it should be only the prevue of the non-profit world.
We have been in this business for over 17 years and we are proud of our track record. However, our motive is not to make huge profits, but to change the way we care for our elders, to disrupt the existing system, to transform the industry. We have done some good damage to the industry so far. For example, wherever we have been, we have provided private units with the same level of care that a private assisted living client gets. We were surprised to find out that in order to compete with us, the private facilities surrounding our programs, are doing the same.
There was a lot of mud throwing in the story. The fact remains that much blame has to be placed in the leadership and the type of message it sends to the staff. If you do not empower your staff, you do not give them the right training, listen to their concerns, pay them reasonable salaries and instill in them that the most valuable asset they have are those whose needs they must meet. We do that and then some in our facilities. It has proven to be the right thing to do.
Unfortunately for those good providers like us, the story does us great harm. It throws a veil of doubt and mistrust. Some viewers might think that all of us follow the same rules. At the end the good ones pay for the mistakes of the bad. When is the media going to understand that? Do we need another boycott?