Drew Vogel

Thirty-three years ago, I entered the nursing home business. In the twenty-four years before that, I was a radio newsman.

Not much resemblance between those two professions!

In one, it’s all out for a story, and egos prevail; in the other, people go about their daily jobs quietly, efficiently and pretty much anonymously. 

One assists people at a difficult time in their lives; the other reports – at times gleefully – on people during the difficult times of their lives.

One is the second most regulated business in America; the other is protected by the First Amendment and has comparatively no regulation.

One requires a college degree and a license; the other merely requires a voice and a pulse.

Within the first year of becoming a nursing home administrator, I realized that the skills needed to successfully raise teenagers are almost the same required to run a facility, a radio station, a major corporation – or the country.

In a real sense, nursing homes owe their existence to working women and Pearl Harbor.

Huh?

Nursing homes have been around in one form or another for many years. The Veterans Home in Sandusky, Ohio, for example, opened in the 1880s to care for Civil War Veterans. But nursing homes escalated in numbers and importance around the 1960s. 

When most Americans lived on farms, the old folks were cared for at home after they could no longer work. Caring for the elderly, like caring for the children, fell to the women.

As the country became more industrialized and the farm folks moved into the city, typically, the men worked a job outside the home, and the women raised the kids and kept the house. The old folks still aged at home.

It remained that way through the early portion of the Twentieth Century; then, in 1941, on a lazy Sunday morning in Hawaii, everything changed. Ultimately, sixteen million working-age Americans, primarily men, marched off to war. 

Enter Rosie.

Nearly 350,000 women were actually in the armed services during the war. But on the “Home Front,” women did far more than their part. By 1945, more than 18 million U.S. women worked in defense industries and support services; nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home. 

“Rosie the Riveter,” star of a government campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for the munitions industry, became perhaps the most iconic image of working women during the war. Nearly everyone alive during and in the years immediately following World War II knows a Rosie. My grandmother worked in a munitions factory in Toledo, Ohio, for example.  

After the war, many of those “Greatest Generation” women – thank you, Tom Brokaw – continued working. The tradition evolved. Their daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters all worked jobs outside the home.

Today women working outside the home are commonplace. In 2019 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 57.4% of all women are in the labor force.  The all-time record was 60% in 1999.

But a report in Becker’s Hospital Review recently indicated 77% of the people in all sectors of healthcare are female.  It’s even higher in long-term care.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operative and Development (OECD) in the U.S., just under 90% of the workers in long-term care today are women.

As the saying goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Women used to provide most of the long-term care in an agrarian society. Women provide most of the long-term care in today’s society.  Only the setting has changed.

Of course, nursing homes aren’t always viewed in a favorable light. 

Part of the reason may be the perception that we don’t live up to the care provided by residents’ families. We probably don’t, but we keep getting better at it.

Last year a Maru public opinion poll of America’s Most Respected Occupations indicated that nurses (second behind firefighters), doctors (fifth) and pharmacists (sixth) were ranked at the top of 28 professions.  

Private Sector LTC Home Operators were ranked 14th – dead center of the pack. 

It would have been nice to be ranked higher, but we did garner more respect than lawyers, union leaders, members of Congress, journalists and car salesmen. 

So in that sense, nursing homes, we are doing better.

Drew Vogel has been a nursing home administrator for 33 years in Ohio, including serving as part-owner of a facility in Cincinnati, running a large behavioral facility for six years and a Veterans home for five years. For the past eight years, he has worked exclusively as an interim administrator. He also edits a weekly LTC newsletter, In The News, which received the Journalism Award from the ACHCA in 2019.

The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.