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/.
Aaron Stapleton, founder and CEO of the Cincinnati-based Trinity In Home Care, 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.
Stapleton sat down with HHCN to talk about the importance of bringing consistency to the world of home-based care, future opportunities in it and how he got his start in the industry.
HHCN: What drew you to this industry?
Stapleton: Originally, I started in senior care as a resident assistant and a private caregiver. I saw that there was a lot of opportunity for improved care for the seniors. Through that opportunity, I wanted to make a difference.
There had been some negative, preconceived notions of what it’s like to go into nursing homes or skilled nursing, or even senior living communities. I wanted to be a leader of senior living communities and make them a place that is really fun. I wanted to make them a place where I’d enjoy living when I got older.
That was what originally drew me. As I continued to advance in my career, I saw that there was an opportunity to grow in leadership, and I really enjoy helping people to recognize skills and talents that they may not have been aware of. Throughout my career, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to help promote people and see them advance their careers.
What I’ve really enjoyed about being in home care is helping seniors to identify their risk for not being able to remain independent. That way they can stay home safe and age in place for as long as they can and have the best quality of life.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?
I would probably say that mistakes are not a negative thing. I think my focus, especially in the beginning, was on perfection. And while we always are striving for perfection, I will say that it has become a little bit more of my mantra that I would prefer myself and my team to make aggressive mistakes. Because those aggressive mistakes allow us the opportunity to make quicker pivots, and make sure that we’re making better calls quicker.
Whenever you’re striving for perfection, you can miss the boat, you can wait too long. And I think that’s been the thing over the past 10 years that I’ve kind of learned is that aggressive mistakes are are a good thing. As long as you’re also able to pivot quickly if there is a problem.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home-based care, what would it be?
My hope and my vision for our industry in the future is just that we can we can find some consistency nationwide.
It’s very interesting to me that there’s not a whole lot of consistency whenever you talk about our industry. And I’m not just talking about the care, I’m also talking about how people define us, right? Some people will will say private pay, some people will say non-medical homecare, some people will say non-skilled, which I very quickly pump the brakes on.
And I understand the reason why people say non-skilled, because of the Medicare definition. But from my standpoint, I would just love to see some consistency within our industry. And I think with that consistency would gain us the ability to educate people outside of the health care realm, which allows us the ability to work on being able to help more people.
I would love to see in the next 10 to 20 years, there to be more payer sources that allow us to come in and help our clients on more of a proactive basis, right?
I don’t feel like it was that long ago that insurances finally started to give people wellness checks for free. And to me, unfortunately, our our society is not very proactive. We don’t have a very proactive mindset when it comes to health care. And I think that’s part of the reason why some of our clientele or older adults are going into the hospital more often than they should.
If we can get that proactive mindset from a payer source standpoint, I think that allows us the opportunity as companies, as an industry, to prevent some of these hospital readmissions.
What do you foresee as being different about the home-based care industry looking ahead to 2023?
I think there are a lot of opportunities for our industry. I think the pandemic has shown us that we can do a lot more with technology than we have in the past.
That’s not to say that technology is going to take over the caregiving aspect. I think in my lifetime, this is going to be a person-centered business, and you need to have the caregiver aspect, but I think that there have been opportunities for our industry to become a little more tech savvy, to utilize both better communication and education our staff, clients and referral sources.
I also think that there are opportunities for us on a national stage to show how important we are to home-based care, which is becoming a very top priority from a national standpoint.
In a word, how would you describe the future of home-based care?
I’m going to have to go back to proactive.
I think, for us to keep clients in their homes, there has to be that proactive mindset. Because once they go into the hospital, once they go into a rehab or what have you, especially with the older generation, I think it takes a lot out of them.
What quality must all Future Leaders possess?
I would probably say empathy. I think that there is a key for empathetic leaders who are interested in listening and learning about the people around them.
I think individuals who truly care about those people around them are going to create a much stronger following. And they’re also going to create people who will be extremely honest with them if they’re messing up or if they’re doing well, but also devoted to the cause and the company.
