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Summary
In this episode of Care Lab, occupational therapists Emilia Bourland and Brandy Archie discuss their motivations for stepping outside traditional healthcare settings to create businesses focused on empowering caregivers. Emilia, founder of Higher Standards Caregiver Training, and Brandy, founder of AskSAMIE, share personal stories and insights into how their work fills gaps in the current healthcare system. Their conversation explores the challenges of caregiving, the lack of standardized training, and the need for accessible resources to enable people to live independently and safely.
Key Takeaways
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Empowering Caregivers: Both Emilia and Brandy aim to bridge gaps in caregiver training and resources through innovative platforms that make professional guidance accessible.
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Gaps in Healthcare: The lack of adequate caregiver training in many states can lead to unsafe situations; both founders aim to address this gap.
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Living Independently: AskSAMIE is designed to help people age in place with appropriate resources, while Higher Standards provides training to improve caregiving quality at home.
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Systemic Advocacy: Both professionals emphasize the importance of being advocates for loved ones, especially when transitioning from hospital to home.
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Caregiving Challenges: They highlight that caregiving isn’t “one-size-fits-all” and requires flexibility, problem-solving, and accessible resources to ensure safety and well-being.
Transcript
Emilia Bourland
Hi, welcome to Care Lab.
Brandy Archie
It's Care Lab Day. How's it going?
Emilia Bourland
it's going, it's going pretty well. You know, it's Friday. I've got things to look forward to this weekend. How about you?
Brandy Archie
It's going good. I like the change in the seasons. So it's not quite as hot as it has been and there's different fun fall things to be doing and so yeah, it feels good.
Emilia Bourland
Mm.
Emilia Bourland
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Okay. Are you ready to dive right in here today?
Brandy Archie
I think so. was just about to ask you, are we doing? It's just me and you. Do we need to do icebreaker? Do we need to do that? Can we just do something else?
Emilia Bourland
I think that's no, I don't think we need to do. And frankly, to be honest with you, full transparency, I don't have a good icebreaker question to ask you. And I feel like at this point in our relationship, Brandi, we might be beyond icebreakers, just the two of us.
Brandy Archie
Hahaha!
Brandy Archie
We might, but I got, actually I have one good thing. We have never met each other in person. So there's one thing I don't know about you. How tall are you?
Emilia Bourland
Okay.
That's true.
Emilia Bourland
That's exactly what I was just wondering. I'm, I am five five. How tall are you?
Brandy Archie
you
I am 5 '10".
Emilia Bourland
Whoa! Dude, you're tall!
Brandy Archie
Yeah, so maybe the cover of our care lab is not very accurate. It makes us look like we're pretty close.
Emilia Bourland
It's not. It does. It makes I'm extremely average and you're pretty tall. Yeah, we should probably we should probably fix that in some way. The problem with perspective is that if we actually make you look that much taller than me in these pictures side by side, you're just going to look like a giant. Yeah, which I don't which I don't think you probably I don't think you look like a giant monster.
Brandy Archie
Giant monster.
Brandy Archie
Thanks, I was worried. Okay, now I think we know everything, but yes.
Emilia Bourland
Yeah, so that's so funny. Now we know everything. What's your favorite color? No, please don't, don't. No favorites.
Brandy Archie
I mean, you know. But you know, one thing that I don't think that our listeners know a lot about is the reason they know a lot about us being OTs. We love to talk about OT. And they know that we're here because we care deeply about educating caregivers because it's a wild world in healthcare and you need to be armed with information. And we want to give that to you. But I don't think they know why we are not working in hospitals.
Emilia Bourland
-huh.
Emilia Bourland
Sure.
Emilia Bourland
Yeah.
Brandy Archie
and like why we have businesses. And so I think it'd be great if we let them in on that.
Emilia Bourland
Yeah, that is actually a really good idea, because it is kind of strange, actually, for two occupational therapists. Well, not strange exactly, but it's unusual. It's not always common for OTs to be out in the business world. There are a lot of OTs who are with podcasts and things like that. And so, yeah, how it...
Brandy Archie
Although it's growing, more people are coming out of the clinic and using their skills in different ways. That's definitely growing.
Emilia Bourland
It's that's true. And that is really, really exciting to me because occupational therapists have so much more to offer the world than, you know, just the things that that fit into a box in a clinic. Right. But yeah, so let's talk about the day. So that today. So can I can I start by asking you like first, you should probably define for obviously I know what ask me is, but you should define for listeners who might not know what is asks. What is AskSAMIE?
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Okay, okay. So AskSAMIE, what we do is help people get the right adaptive equipment and resources and services so that they can age and place well. We have found in our careers that there are three main things that help people be successful at home and that's the environment accommodates your needs, that you are able to use your community resources, and that you're connected with the right services to support your independence or your caregiving. And so the
Unfortunate part about that is all of that is spread out in different places in the world and on the internet and we're putting it all in one place. So that's easy to find.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Emilia Bourland
Can I just tell you, and I think you know this already, but like when we very first met, how long ago did we meet?
Brandy Archie
Year and a half?
Emilia Bourland
year and a half, maybe two years, I don't know, something like that. And you told me what AskSAMIE did. I was so blown away by how, like, just what a great idea that was to help genuinely get people what they need. Because that's one of the biggest hurdles, I think, for folks to get over is like getting the right equipment for their needs is actually a really, really big deal.
And how often have you seen problems that have occurred because people have not been connected with that right equipment or those right resources, right? So like creating this really, really simple solution to make it so people are actually getting the appropriate equipment for the appropriate need. It sounds really simple, but it didn't exist before. And the amount of impact and good that it can do in the world. Like I was so blown away by that and continue to be.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
You know, I fan girl on you all day long because it's amazing. Yeah.
Brandy Archie
appreciate that.
Well, know, like, it's been like a journey to get to where it is right now, but it really initiated it because of my work as an OT, like in the clinic. okay.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Brandy Archie
our job is to help people be as independent and as safe as possible, right? And if it's not a knee or a hip or something that's gonna get better, which most of my practice has been focused with older adults, so a lot of the stuff that they're dealing with is not really gonna get better, you know, because we're dealing with Parkinson's and stroke and there's improvement, but it's still like very impactful to your life. So now, if I can't like regenerate or fix you, what can I do to make you be more independent? And so I've always leaned into, okay,
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Brandy Archie
Maybe the environment can just better support you. You know, we do this for kids all the time. They have shorter beds so they can climb in and schools have little desks so they can fit in them. Like, why would you force them to be in something that doesn't work for their bodies? Same thing applies to us as adults, I think. And so I spent so much time gathering resources and learning about the new sketches that are out there. That's not a burden to me. I love doing that because, you know, inventors are making stuff to solve problems and
That's awesome. The problem is the people who need it don't know about it until, I wish I would known that two years ago when my dad first had a stroke that we could have totally used that would make our life so much easier. And that's why the inventor made it, but you just didn't know that existed. That feels ridiculous to me, right? And so I just kept on trying to be a Rolodex of all this stuff and just keep gathering information and then spit it out at the right time to the right patient. Like, I learned about this thing. You need to know that thing. And frankly, it was
fun to do, but exhausting because as soon as I found a way to like provide that to somebody, print out a paper, make a database, whatever, like it kind of became obsolete. You know, like the store wouldn't carry it anymore. The link is broken or whatever. And it just got to be like too hard. Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Emilia Bourland
Or also like people lose those pieces of paper, right? Stuff gets misplaced or they forget or whatever it is. And so like you did all of this work to make sure someone is able to get what they needed and then.
Brandy Archie
they lose it and then also if I'm not at work that day and said person calls back, I was like, she gave me the, like there's no record of that. Nobody else knows it, it's only in my head. And that didn't feel right to me. And so I left and my own business and started like doing that for the community in Kansas City. And that first business was Accessible Living. And so that was cool too, but it only worked for as far as we could drive.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Brandy Archie
Kansas City happens to be like a pretty big place. It encompasses quite a few miles. You could drive for an hour and without traffic and still be in Kansas City's metro limits. And so, yeah, they used annexing very well. So like, it's just a big community. So there's, yeah. And so we would give referrals for people that lived outside of a economical range for us to drive to and provide service.
Emilia Bourland
Wow, I didn't realize it. That's huge.
Hahaha!
Brandy Archie
And I didn't feel right. And that's not even like rural rule for real. It's just like not in our downtown, you know? And so that's how we came to the idea of turning it into something digital that way anybody anywhere could access the information. And now we're just like hoarding all the resources, pulling all one in the place. So now you only have one place to go to get all this stuff. And I don't have to be present to do it. You don't have to connect with me. You can do it independently on your own. You can connect with an OT on the site. But if you really want some
additional help, but it's made to democratize the information around AGM Place.
Emilia Bourland
And can I point out one more thing that I think is really important about AskSAMIE? It is the fact that it is run by you as an occupational therapist and created from your occupational therapy mind. Because I think that there are other sites that have attempted to do what you have done. And they just frankly haven't really done it. They haven't done
Brandy Archie
Mmm.
Emilia Bourland
certainly as well as you have, and they haven't achieved that same goal because they're not looking at it through that same lens. And there is a value that AskSAMIE brings to the table because it's occupational therapy led and based that I think other sites just really, they just can't touch, if I'm being honest. It makes a difference.
Brandy Archie
Mm
Brandy Archie
What do they get makes a difference? Because it comes from experience. It's not just an amalgamation of all the things possible. It's the things that are easy to use. We've used them with our own patients and it solves a real problem. There's a whole lot of stuff actually marketed that sounds fancy and cool, but like it doesn't actually solve a problem. It's just spending money on something to, know, because it sounds cool. And so we're narrowing.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Brandy Archie
the wide world of what could exist down to the stuff that we know works really well. And then, but in that same breath, adding as many things as possible in all of the things that would touch your life, I guess is what I'm saying. Anything that could be beneficial to you. We want to have at least one of them there so that you can find it all in one place because it's, nobody got time for that basically, you know? Like whether you're a therapist trying to refer your patients to get the stuff they need, you ain't got time for looking all this up.
If you're a family trying to figure it out for your mother who lives two states away, like you ain't got time to be Googling and get whatever happens to be well -resourced and paid for ads. You want to know what works. And so that's, I think that's the biggest value. It's not like you can't find this stuff on your own. You could, it's all on the internet. But the value is that we've put it in one place and we've verified it for you.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Emilia Bourland
And you've also done a good job curating what people actually see when they put in their problems. So if you go to AskSAMIE, you take a little quiz, it will basically ask you what kinds of issues you're seeing or functional problems you're having. And it's not going to spit every single thing out at you and then leave you wandering through this wilderness of stuff to decide. It says, OK, if this is the specific problem, then these are the solutions that are likely to work for you.
Brandy Archie
Yeah, that's not helpful.
Emilia Bourland
Right. And again, that's really different than just going on Google and getting anything that happens to have a keyword match or getting anything on a site that again happens to have a keyword match with whatever search you put in for if it's, you know, feeding or transfers or equipment or whatever. It's it makes it impossible to sort through a hundred items. If you get a hundred items like no one wants that, no one can do that. No one's got time for that. Like you said, AskSAMIE does that for you. So.
Brandy Archie
Mm
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
instead of a hundred things to look at, you have just a few things to look at. And from there, it's really easy to decide. And like you said, it's verified, like, okay, this is actually gonna help with my problem. What a relief.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah, that's how I feel about it. You know, it's like, did, okay, I've worked a lot of places, all the settings. I literally have worked on all the settings, except for schools. That's the only one I haven't done, and Burns. But everywhere else I've worked. But all that time, I always did home health on the side, if it wasn't my full -time job, because I just, I don't know. I like going to people's houses and doing OT. I think it's awesome. And the number of times I have seen somebody have
perfectly good adaptive equipment piled up in the garage or sitting in a basement because while it is a good shower chair, it's not the right shower chair for that person and it didn't work for them for whatever reason. And that's wasted money and wasted effort. And also a lot of times they don't have a replacement. They don't have the right one. They just know that they don't like that one and that one didn't work. And so they're still, they still probably have the need, right? There's still balance issues. There's still some struggle. And so that's like unsafe time.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Emilia Bourland
Yeah.
Brandy Archie
Maybe more falls have happened because of that. And that don't even make any sense to me. know, like that shouldn't be the case in this world that we're in right now and all of the resources that we have available to us. And so that was the impetus for it. So that's what we did.
Emilia Bourland
Awesome. Amazing. People should check that out for sure. AskSAMIE.com.
Brandy Archie
Yeah, I mean, go to asksemi .com. You should do it. You should do it. And you should share it as a resource. If you're a therapist, you should use it. OK, one of the cool things that I don't know when this is going to come out and when we're going to be ready, but I'm trying to help not just the family, but also the me of 2010 who was doing all this research. And so soon you'll be able to, as a clinician, whether it's an OT or a social worker or whoever is working with the family, go on.
Emilia Bourland
Mm
Brandy Archie
build a cart of stuff that you are recommending. And that can be all the things, like a resource, a service, or a product, and type in why you think they need it or put some notes towards it and share that with the family. So then they can easily access all the links to all the things in one fell swoop. And you didn't have to organize all that. And we keep that up to date. We make sure that that product is available and not out of stock and that service still exists and that phone number works. And so you don't have to do that.
Emilia Bourland
That's gonna be very cool. That's gonna be very, very cool.
Brandy Archie
Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, I'm excited about that part. yeah, so if you're a professional and you're making recommendations to seniors, you should get a user account. It's free.
So Amelia, you also have a business and left the traditional clinical world. So why did you do that?
Emilia Bourland
I do indeed.
Emilia Bourland
Well, I should start by saying that I actually love being a clinician. I love treating patients. I've worked in pretty much every adult setting except for like LTACs. No, no Peds for me, but pretty much every adult setting I have worked there. And I loved it all. I just really, really enjoy being a clinician and getting to see those moments of
Brandy Archie
Mm
Emilia Bourland
progress and when people like do when someone does something that they didn't think that they could do or they see that it's possible for them to do something that they didn't think they could do like that is the that is the most wonderful moment you can imagine and I just eat that up. So for me to leave that I had to be really really motivated that there was a bigger
Brandy Archie
Yes.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
problem that I could solve. I actually, I initially left traditional clinical practice and opened up a private practice doing home modifications. And the reason that I did that was really because I got so tired of seeing people in the hospital that just didn't need to be in the hospital. And I knew that if I could get to them beforehand that I could prevent harm.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
and really increase people's quality of life. And that was my initial motivation. So I went and I started that, string home modifications. And what I then came upon, you know, because sometimes the first business idea that you have that you think is gonna be the thing, it's not always the thing, right? It's mostly true. It's not always the thing. So what I was finding though was that I'd be in people's homes,
Brandy Archie
It's not always the thing. Yep, that's mostly true, actually.
Emilia Bourland
And I basically kept getting slapped in the face with the fact that the caregivers who were there, both family caregivers, as well as the like professional non -medical caregivers who were often in these situations to help out, just did not have the skills that they needed in order to safely care for the people that they were caring for. And so I found myself a lot of times in these situations, I might be called in to take a look at someone's bathroom setup.
you know, that's the most common reason I get a call, right? Can you come look at, can't get in the shower. Can you come look at the shower? So I'd be in there for that, but then I'd also see, okay, this person also needs transfer training, or I'm there and they also are asking me, how do I turn this person in bed? How do I, you know, do this? How do I do that? The urine collection bag is way up high and it needs to be down low. So at the same time, I'm supposed to be there to do,
Brandy Archie
always bathrooms. Yep.
Emilia Bourland
all, you know, just home modification purely looking at the environment, I kept finding that there was such a great need for skills education. And you know, it's not rocket science, okay? It's just knowledge. And I it's some, you just need to know how to do the thing. And I feel really fortunate that because of being an occupational therapist,
Brandy Archie
Sometimes you just need to how to do a thing.
Emilia Bourland
It's equipped me in order to really give these people the skills and the knowledge that they need in a way that they can apply in their daily life. So I was, so I kind of was seeing that that was a need, but then also I was like, I'm just one person. There are like in Texas alone, where I am, there are something like 3 million caregivers.
Brandy Archie
Hmm.
Brandy Archie
This is like family caregivers and like professional caregivers.
Emilia Bourland
That's actually just family caregivers. are millions more non -medical professional caregivers. This is just in one state. And I'm just little old me. And so I can't go to all of those houses. I can't get to all those houses. And you know what? If you took every occupational therapist in the state of Texas, we still couldn't meet all of those needs. There are just not enough of us. So I saw this big problem.
Brandy Archie
You can't get to all those houses.
Brandy Archie
Mm
Emilia Bourland
I knew that I had these skills and the knowledge to genuinely help solve it for people. And then it just became a matter of how do I figure out how to provide this information in a way that everyone can access and they can get to it in a way that they can afford. They can get to it without needing to have a doctor's order to see an occupational therapist, right? And so I went about solving that problem essentially by starting to create
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Yep.
Emilia Bourland
my video library of content at Higher Standards Caregiver Training, really going through all of the things that I had trained people on in person hundreds, maybe thousands of times in person through the course of my career and, and really kind of creating that content and curating it based on how the real world really looks and the actual questions that I had been asked.
Brandy Archie
Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
hundreds of times and knowing what people were likely to need or to know based on different scenarios. So, you know, for me, it was just a matter of like creating that course library and starting to put it out into the world in a way that was open and accessible for people to get. And of course, you know, we provide a lot of training content for non -medical home care agencies. Those are kind of our primary customer.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
But we still also have training content for family caregivers at higher standards caregiver training too, because the goal is to improve as many lives as possible through, again, just good quality education.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Samuel, don't the people get trained before they discharge home?
Emilia Bourland
Ha ha ha! That's a good question. Well, yes and no.
Brandy Archie
I trained many people. I did train many people before they discharge home. But what's the problem between like, even if you do get trained at home, to like translate that to actual home?
Emilia Bourland
Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
Yeah, so to kind of answer your question fully. Yeah, and of course, that's where my basic training knowledge comes from is I've trained, you know, untold number of people in all these different settings, right? So of course, we're out there providing this training. I think that there are two answers to that question is one that everyone actually doesn't get that training. We want that to be true. We hope that's true. But the fact is, it's not necessarily true. If you don't
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
If your doctor doesn't write that order, you know, or if for whatever reason, the staffing situation doesn't allow that to happen before you get discharged home from the hospital, then you probably won't necessarily get that training. And the second part of it is, again, yes, of course we are out there training as much as we can in rehabs and at hospitals before people, and in outpatient when people are going home.
But you don't necessarily absorb everything that you are being taught during those trainings, right? Like it's a very stressful time for people. There are a lot of things on their minds. You're getting a lot of education from a lot of different disciplines about what needs to go on at home. And so you're probably not going to remember everything. It takes most people seven to eight times of hearing information.
Brandy Archie
Yeah.
Brandy Archie
Yep.
Emilia Bourland
before they can apply the information. Seven to eight times. So.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm. And you're not getting seven to eight training sessions at rehab. You're hardly there for seven days, to be honest with you. But like, if you're working and doing other things, like, you can't be there at every therapy session and put your hands on the person on every therapy session, even in the best case scenario. it means that everybody's at a deficit.
Emilia Bourland
Mm.
Emilia Bourland
Everybody is at a deficit, no matter where you're coming from. So there's just no way that you are actually able to remember and apply all of that information. That's just not how brains work, basically. The other part of it is that home looks really different a lot of the time from the way the rehab or the hospital is, right? And so while we hope, again, that you're being trained
Brandy Archie
No matter what. Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
as closely as you can based on your individual environment at home. Sometimes that doesn't always happen. And so the way that I have tried to create the education on higherstandardstraining .com is really about
teaching you how to navigate problems and situations using the best possible standards and the best possible decision -making tools, but wherever and however your situation looks. Because let's be honest, caregiving is not paint by numbers. You do have to make decisions no matter who you are. And so it's not saying, well,
Brandy Archie
Yeah.
Brandy Archie
Mm
Emilia Bourland
this is where you put the chair and this is how you lock the brakes and this is how you do X, Y, of a transfer. Although certainly we go over those scenarios, but it's more about saying, how do we make good decisions in the situations that we're in by applying the right rules and principles to this situation? So kind of similar to how you do it at AskSAMIE, where you're using your OT brain to help guide people in the right direction.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
All of the education on higherstandardscaregivertraining .com is geared to use an OT brain and give that OT brain to the person who is actually there in the situation to help them make good care decisions from that point forward. And when we do that, we can really, really influence positive outcomes. If you think about it, who is there with people who need care all the time? It's not me.
Brandy Archie
Nope.
Emilia Bourland
It's not the doctor, it's not the nurse. Like we have little check -ins, right? But the person who's there all day long is the caregiver. So who has the biggest impact on the healthcare outcomes and quality of life? I would argue, I would argue all day long that it is, that it's lay people who are caregivers who actually have the biggest impact. So if we arm caregivers with the right knowledge and tool set, how many wounds can we prevent?
Brandy Archie
the caregivers.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
How many cases of aspiration pneumonia can we prevent? How many unnecessary UTIs can we prevent? How many falls do you think we can prevent? There's no limit to what we can help with by simply giving people good, good information. And so that's the goal.
Brandy Archie
And that's why higher standards caregiver training is so valuable, I think, because we live in this very microwave kind of age where it's like, okay, let me watch a little reel, a little TikTok, a little short 30 second video and I'll know how to do this thing. And in some cases that's fine, right? But when you're thinking about the whole person, the whole picture, it's not cookie cutter. It's not like it was a rehab. It's not like it was, maybe even in your video.
But because the videos are longer, which is the thing I love about it, and it goes through your thought process behind how to make a decision, now I know how to think about it for my own self in my own home, or even when we make a change. And yeah, I know how to do caregiving at our house, but when we go to Thanksgiving dinner, how are we gonna do the toilet at the other person's house, right? We wanna be able to go, we don't wanna have to stay here. When you're armed with the way to think about it and the way to decide.
And to be prepared, makes everything so much better and that can extrapolate out to all the situations in which you might find yourself in, which is the goal, right? Cause we don't want to keep people staying at home in their bedroom. That's the only place that they access because that's the only place you have to feel comfortable and safe. want you to feel like you can live life, right? Like living life to the fullest is one of O .T.' slogans from the past, you know? And so I think that's why I love what you do so much and why I think it's so important.
And like the other one thing that you have to talk about is how much training do hired caregivers get?
Emilia Bourland
Okay.
Emilia Bourland
Ooh, okay, well that depends very much on the state that you're in. The vast majority of states, and also depends how the caregiver is defined, right? So home health aides get a basic level of training. They're required to basically because of Medicaid, because of the payer source, they're required to have a certain amount of training to become a home health aide, right? We know that CNAs are certified nursing assistants, so they,
Brandy Archie
Mmm.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
are getting a basic level of education. But then there are these other folks who fall into the bucket of non -medical caregivers. And again, kind of depending on the state where you're at, they might be called different things. They could be called like personal care assistants. They could be called companions. They could, sometimes it's just like private duty, right? It depends where you're at exactly like what they're called, but the long and short of it.
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
there are these non -medical caregivers, right? So they are not required in the majority of states to have any training at all.
Brandy Archie
Wait, say that for the people in the back. In most states, they're not required.
Emilia Bourland
In most states, non -medical caregivers are not required to have any training at all. If you think that's insane, it's because it is. And what I would also say is, in some ways there are reasons for that, right? The more training someone is required to have, the more expensive that individual.
Brandy Archie
Yeah, because there's not enough.
Emilia Bourland
becomes, the more expensive services become. And let's be honest, it's already hard for people to afford to have a private caregiver in their home if that's something that they need. But at the same time, what these people do is so, so, so important. We can't ignore the fact that for their own health and well -being and confidence, as well as the health and well -being of the people that they're caring for,
They deserve better. They deserve to be trained in a way that allows them to do their job confidently and competently. And again, that's kind of what we're all about at Higher Standards Caregiver Training. Like it's about arming these people who maybe aren't required to have this information, but they should have this information, right? If we really care about what we're doing, if we really care about the people that we're serving, then
Brandy Archie
Yeah.
Emilia Bourland
we want to make sure that we're giving them this information. And it allows agencies to do that in a way that is incredibly cost effective, in a way that's really simple and easy to access. And we've also done some very cool things to actually help caregivers to take their training, which can be a big, big barrier in the online training world, particularly for like staffing or employment is getting.
caregivers to actually take the training. Well, we have some pretty cool tricks that we use for that to get people engaged.
Brandy Archie
Yeah, my mind was just literally blown when I realized that all of the home, in -home caregivers that I had encountered that I was teaching as a home health therapist, you know, how to follow through with the care that we just kind of came up with, with this patient. And first I thought like, maybe I'm just getting somebody who's inexperienced and they haven't been a caregiver for very long. But then I realized like in the state of Missouri, you don't have to have any training. And this is not like a baseline.
I don't like to tell people stuff that they already know, so I didn't talk down to them. And so I was saying things like, yeah, we're going to use the Hoyer lift to do da -da, and they would be like, had not used the Hoyer lift before. And so we really needed to practice doing that. And they learned and they did it. But like, the point is, they didn't have that knowledge, yet they're there to be able to provide care. And that's the kind of care that person needs. And so, yeah, I think that's a problem in the healthcare industry, but.
you as a caregiver, a family caregiver, should know that your additional help might not be well trained and you again are the person who is the primary in charge of the caregiving. So you need to also pass that information on to your hired caregivers too so they know how to care for your loved one. And I don't know, see if they can subscribe to a higher standards caregiver training. You don't gotta train them. Listen, I need you to watch this video.
Emilia Bourland
There you go. Can I share a story with you that what you were saying reminded me of? So I had a caregiver, this is a few months ago. She found me along, this was a caregiver in New York, professional non -medical caregiver. And actually I want to say she was working in the capacity as a non -medical caregiver, but she had her CNA as well, because there are a lot of CNAs who kind of go into that work as well. She lived in New York.
Brandy Archie
Sure.
Brandy Archie
Okay.
Brandy Archie
Okay.
Emilia Bourland
She had found our course on Hoyers, actually, took the course on Hoyer training, and then she personally reached out to me, like personally called me to tell me how important this training had been to her. So we talked for a while. I love getting to talk to people, because I like people, you may have noticed. So we talked for a while. came to find out she'd been a caregiver for years and years, had never been properly trained.
Brandy Archie
You
Emilia Bourland
how to do a Hoyer or how to use a Hoyer for a transfer. The reason that she took the course is because she had an incident with a client where something went wrong with the Hoyer transfer because it wasn't used properly and the client was injured. And she said it was horrible. She felt, I mean, she felt awful. This is a person who cared very, very deeply about the people that she was caring for. She felt so bad.
Brandy Archie
Mmm.
Brandy Archie
Devastating.
Emilia Bourland
that something had happened. And she told me, her words were, I knew I had to get more training for me and for the people that I was taking care of. And so on her own, her employer didn't do this for her. On her own, she went out and she found higher standards caregiver training. She took the course. She ended up taking a ton of courses to help further her knowledge. And like,
I think that is the quintessential example of one, why we do what we do and why it's really, really important that caregivers get this training because it does have consequences. And those consequences can be positive or they can be negative. So let's make it positive by getting them what they need. And two, the fact that caregivers really, really want this information too. It genuinely matters. They want it. So...
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
You know, again, it's all about how can we make this easy, accessible, affordable for as many people as possible so that we can have a positive impact on as many lives.
Brandy Archie
Yeah. It's so important to do, still such a big need. It feels overwhelming. And I think that's like, you can't, you know this, you can't run a marathon without taking the first step, right? And while I'd argue we're not at step one or two, we still have lots in both of our areas that I think we wanna accomplish and see happen.
Emilia Bourland
Mmm.
Emilia Bourland
Yeah, 100%.
Brandy Archie
and in a systematic way, you know, and not, you know, frankly ad hoc as it is now where people happen to find us. And it should be incorporated into the way the systems work. But that takes a lot of us to be advocating for really, you know, and asking for like, getting that information and asking those hard questions before you hire an -home caregiver.
and asking the questions to your team when your loved one is getting discharged home and make sure you have all the information, what resources are available to me when I don't remember this, when I get home. And yeah, just being advocates, I think is like really what we're saying about both of the things we do. know, providing information means that we're trying to arm you to be a better advocate and whether it's for yourself or for someone else. And when you do that for the system too. So yeah.
Emilia Bourland
Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, like, we all have to be on the same page. We all have to work together in order to really genuinely create change that we're hoping for. We talk all the time, right, about how our health care system is broken. And, you know, each of us has found in our own way, a way to help fill the gaps in, in that system and help to make it easier for people. But it really does take everyone working together.
Brandy Archie
Mm
Brandy Archie
Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland
to go down that road. I think, like you said, through our SEMI, through higher standards caregiver training, hopefully we're providing an avenue for people to be better advocates for themselves, to get more of what they need and push for the kind of change that is really required to make sure people are getting what they need. Because that's what it's about.
Brandy Archie
That's what it's about. Well, I think I know your motivation is even better than I did before. So hopefully, listeners know a little bit more about how we came to be doing this stuff. And if you connect with that or have questions, please leave us comments and let us know. And we're happy to extrapolate or add to that. And then let us know what else you want to talk about because we always want to hear from you so we can provide the content that is going to help you be a better advocate.
So like and subscribe and we'll see you next time on Care Lab.
Emilia Bourland
Bye.
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