Culture and faith is the foundation for high quality care
BY DANIELLE ANDERSEN
Ethos Home Health Care is about more than delivering high-quality home care in Eastern North Dakota and West Central Minnesota – it’s about having a fantastic place to work.
Ethos offers skilled nursing care, therapy, and home health aide services, including chronic disease and medication management, physical, occupational, and speech therapy aimed at recovery, and day-to-day help with activities like dressing and grooming.
Formed in 2014, Ethos Home Health Care is guided by a dedication to collaboration, stewardship, and integrity based on guiding Christian principles of caring and compassionate service.
But being focused on service means more than just caring for patients and clients – it means having the right people on our team who can carry out that mission. Two of those “right people” are James Nelson and Corey Langerud. Here is what they do, and how they are building a rewarding career doing something they love.
James Nelson’s mom was in a car accident about a decade ago. He watched his mom struggle through rehab, and saw her determination to return to life as normal. Experiencing her struggle and determination fueled his drive to become a physical therapist assistant. And it’s been both rewarding and enriching, he said.
“The most rewarding part of my job is getting people better and helping them succeed in their homes,” he said. “With in-home care, we do a lot of helping people try to stay out of the hospital, resume their independence and get back to the community, and just overall help recover whether it’s mental or physical.”
Receiving physical therapy at home is different than what you’d receive in a clinic or inpatient setting. Instead of daily meetings with a therapist, patients receive care once or twice a week, with the therapist assuming the role of a coach, helping lead patients to recovery. There is also a functional component that Nelson emphasizes as the most valuable part of receiving therapy at home. Therapists are able to use the patient’s home environment and real-life routines to develop a treatment plan that enables the individual to independently perform the same day-to-day activities they’ll continue post-therapy.
Physical therapy, he said, is a good choice for those who have recently had surgery or a fall in the home. Perhaps they have noticed their balance waning, or have trouble getting in and out of a chair or their bed. The therapy, then, is both a form of recovery and an offensive move against future declined health, said Nelson.
“A lot of the goals we work with in physical therapy, we’re all talking about function and trying to improve function and help people return to the lifestyle they had before their accident, their injury, or trying to promote what they currently have and get them improved,” he said.
“Therapists will ask patients, ‘How are your walking distances?’ ‘Are you able to get to the point where you’re able to leave your house safely, go to the supermarket to get your groceries?’ ‘Are you able to walk all the way to your doctor’s appointments down the long hallways with the doctor?’ ‘Are we trying to improve balance and reduce your falls?’ Are we trying to hopefully get you fall free?’”
Ethos’ grounding as a faith-based company creates a different attitude, a foundation in grace, and a dedicated care for people that set it apart from other providers, Nelson said.
“I believe faith and compassion and just the general loving of everybody is very important because that’s why we all went into the healthcare field,” he said.
Corey Langerud grew an interest in medicine into a career in physical therapy.
In college, Langerud spent a lot of time shadowing different occupations in medicine and came to the realization that it was in physical therapy that he could spend the most high-quality time with patients. Now, he loves it.
“The most rewarding part of my job is working with people to develop tools to help themselves,” he said. “A lot of aspects in medicine, people get dependent on providers for treatment and things such as that. But physical therapy is kind of unique since our job is more so to teach people how to take care of themselves. It’s nice to be able to empower people to do that so that if something pops up in the future, they don’t necessarily need our help again. And it also enhances their life and makes them feel a little more empowered to take it into their own hands.”
Home health care, he said, “focuses on the stuff that truly matters.” It is in in-home care that therapists apply care for true real-world tasks and settings – getting up and down, walking, getting dressed, or showering.
Most of what Langerud does is focused on helping patients to walk, with or without an assistive device. Walking is the key to independence since it allows people to get to the kitchen to make a meal, get into town to get their hair cut, and get down the hall to go to the bathroom, he said.
Previously, Langerud was in an outpatient setting, and while rewarding, he did not feel that it was impacting people on a personal level.
“I chose to work for Ethos because it’s a home care company and I really wanted to work in the home care setting, and also because the people who work at Ethos from the very first day I met them were fantastic,” he said. “I’m a firm believer that culture kind of dictates everything. If you have employees who are happy where they are, they’re going to be happy when they’re out in the community serving patients. And I got that vibe the moment I stepped in the doors of Ethos and it hasn’t wavered since.”
At Ethos, he said, he was treated as a person, not just an employee. The company understands that he has a family, hobbies, and friends, and takes an interest in that.
“You develop real friendships here,” he said. “And since I’ve been here, not a single employee has left. And I think that speaks a lot for the company. That the only time a position opens is when someone’s being promoted from within the organization or if they’re moving out of town or doing something like that. But nobody ever leaves to go somewhere else, and so I think that speaks a lot for the type of culture that they’ve created here at Ethos.”
To learn more about the home health care that Ethos delivers, or to speak to someone about a career at Ethos, contact them today at www.ethoscare.org or call (701) 960-1026.
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