MHA Corner Podcast

Intro:
Welcome to the MHA Corner Podcast, where we discuss the latest news and developments in the post-acute space. Today, we have a special episode focused on a program that holds deep significance for both MHA and millions of veterans across the country. We’re joined by Tom Maxwell, MHA’s Founder, CEO, and a veteran himself, along with Derrik Staples from Mission Healthcare—also a veteran and dedicated advocate. In this episode, they’ll dive into the hospice 5-Star veterans’ program, discussing its powerful impact on the veteran community and why specialized care for veterans is so essential.

Tom:
Hi, I'm Tom Maxwell. I'm the Chairman of Maxwell Healthcare Associates. Thank you for listening to this podcast and thank you to Derrik Staples for being our guest on this podcast today. The topic of the podcast that we really want to talk about is the veterans’ programs that NHPCO has put together, over the years.

Mission Healthcare has adopted this program over the years and Derrik's taken the lead on it. Being a veteran, I served for ten years in the Navy, as a Navy hospital corpsman, from 1990 to 2000.
It's something that I'm super passionate about, something that I know Derrik's super passionate about. And so, I want to describe the program, talk a little bit it and tell some stories about how the programs have helped our veterans, whether they're active, retired, or on service with us. So that's me. We'll jump in a little bit more. Derrik, please introduce yourself.

Derrik:
Yes, my name is Derrik Staples. I am the Veterans Program Director for Mission Healthcare. I am an army veteran. I went in in 1999, served eight years, was a paratrooper, so airborne infantry. I was that guy jumping out of perfectly good airplanes and blowing stuff up. It’s something I absolutely love and very proud of.

What inspired the creation of the five-star veterans’ program and how did the NHPCO veterans program serve as a model or influence?

Derrik:
I'll go ahead and start with this one, Tom, if that's okay. What inspired it was the need. There are a lot of veterans that are underserved in our communities and especially on the home health and hospice side. We're coming in now to our Vietnam era veterans where there's just that lack of trust of the system, lack of trust of anyone outside of their inner circle to open up these programs, to have more ways and better ways to reach some of these veterans is it was imperative to have. We're getting into this era where there's not the trust and we need to have as many avenues as possible to reach them.

Tom:
The program is called, “We Honor Veterans,” NHPCO established. There’re different levels that a hospice can be recognized for, it's more work than you think. It's a lot of work to become a five-star level, but it's also really important to be a one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star.

The program is about how do you support veterans, how do you take care of veterans? What do you do with veterans knowing that these people have major trauma in their life? A lot of them still have PTSD or they have war related injuries, or their family members have had war related PTSD. Their dads, moms, aunts, uncles were gone for a long period of time, unable to communicate back home.

These programs are super, super important for the hospice and especially in the hospice side, to know how to take care of veterans, to know how to treat them with respect, know the different types of pinning ceremonies and honoring a veteran when they pass away with the appropriate flag ceremony.
Derrik spends a ton of time doing this, he’s super passionate. He has a team of people that work with him. Derrik, tell us a little bit about the different levels, one, two, three, four, and five, and what it takes to meet those levels.

Derrik:
The first level is basically signing up and joining a hospice veteran partnership. Here in San Diego, I'm lucky enough to serve as co-chair of the hospice veteran partnership out here. I've helped a lot of hospices here in San Diego, get going on this process. Mission is now the fourth company I've helped get to the highest level of, and this is just in my career.

Level one is basically signing up, joining a hospice veteran partnership.

Level two, you start tracking how many veteran patients you have. So weekly I run a report for the entire company finding out how many veterans we have in each branch and everything else. I have become quite the master of the home care home base report.

Level three is when you start doing a lot of trainings for your staff. You're actually providing veteran specific trainings to whatever era of service they have. We personally at Mission Healthcare, we've started training our nurses specifically to the World War II, because we're coming to the end of their being around, I guess you could say. And we're focusing a lot on the end of the World War II and getting really into the Vietnam era because those are the veterans that are now our patients for the most part. They're in their seventies, eighties, stuff like that. We also have training for Desert Storm Desert Shield and even Iraqi freedom and stuff like that. So very specific with the Vietnam era veterans, you're dealing a lot with the agent orange, stuff like that. PTSD, the undiagnosed PTSD for the most part.
Level four is when you continue on with those trainings for your staff, and you start doing more community trainings as well. I'm going around to a lot of our assisted livings, our skilled nursing’s, and doing the trainings I can because I've done the trainer courses. This is where we really start being a good partner to our outside agencies.

To go from level four to level five it takes an entire calendar year. You have to do community events. You have to do, again, the community trainings, and you have to track absolutely everything possible. You have to track veteran staffing that you have at your agency. You have to track veteran patients; pretty much everything, one through four. And then it's just a giant, pretty rad package that you present to NHPCO each year. This is what we've done. This is allowing us to maintain that level.
So much goes into it, and I apologize. I don't have all of it in front of me, but I've done it a few times. But it is, like Tom said earlier, it is very intense. It is a lot of work, a lot of tracking, and a lot of crossing T's and dotting I’s to make sure, especially our clinicians are getting the right training to take care of this underserved community.

How does the program improve the lives and end of life care for veterans? And then can you share any memorable stories or a case that highlights the profound impacts of the programs on veterans and their families?

Derrik:
Absolutely. So, your first question there, how has it changed the lives? It's support they might not have gotten previously. And Tom can probably speak on this as well. I know we all get thanked for our service the time anyone finds out I wear an army shirt or something. “Oh, did you serve?” You know. “Yep, I did.” Tom and I are probably the same people where we don't like to talk about it too much. “Yep, we did.” “Loved it.” “Thankful for it,” you know, go back on, a lot of times, these are men and women that have felt forgotten.

These are men and women that have felt underserved, underappreciated. There's just so many different emotions and feelings that probably affect their diagnosis even more, especially if they're dealing with the PTSD of any kind. It's a wonderful outreach. It's a wonderful way to better serve them. It's just like any other patient that we have on hospice, we want to have a specific care plan for them. We want our people to be trained. If we have someone that needs ostomy, we want a nurse that's been trained in ostomy and knows how to provide that care.

So, if we have a veteran patient with PTSD, Agent Orange, any kind of service connection, maybe amputee, maybe lost their legs, they're already feeling like they're less of a man or woman than what they previously were. We want our staff to actually have that arrow in their quiver to better care for these veterans.

We want them to have that experience. I don't need to try to understand what they're going through, because I'll never truly understand. If you haven't served, you'll never understand. But what I can do is be empathetic. What I can do is go through and remember this training that I received and be empathetic, be caring, and show them that I'm here.

It might take three or four visits to really establish that trust, but it's giving these nurses, these caregivers, whoever is going out and seeing these patients, that information and that training to best care for them and best meet those patients where they need to be met.

So that is the biggest thing. The trainings that we have for NHPCO, the trainings that we've done here at Mission Healthcare and continue to do. I'm very proud of our people that have helped put this together with me are amazing clinicians that truly care. That's the difference. That is absolutely the difference, is caring and meeting them where they need to be met.

Tom:
I would say the other thing, just to add to what Derrik said, absolutely agree with everything you said. A lot of times, a veteran to veteran, it's amazing when guys like me and Derrik that are out there, if a veteran's working with a veteran, they'll talk to each other like crazy.

I've had veterans that, when I was part of a program in Texas called Trophy Club Sloops, Wounded Warriors. Veterans will talk to veterans. They don't want to talk to the average person out there, for some reason. It's bizarre. Sometimes they want to share their story sometimes they don't.
But if you set a corpsman down with a jarhead or a marine or an army airborne guy, they'll start telling stories and start talking and start opening up to each other because they feel like it's a safe place to talk about. And we both understand what we went through.

So, I think that's super, super important. I think the other piece of it that I think is really important is when we educate the clinicians, whether it's an aide, a nurse, chaplain, social worker, whoever, we're also educating them around the benefits that veterans receive. What is a pending ceremony, what is a military honored funeral, what are the benefits that they have? What does the VA give you?

And a lot of times people are uneducated around that they might have served in the seventies or the sixties, and they haven't, once they got out of the military, they haven't been following in the VA. They're not hanging out at the local chapters or any of those kinds of things, so they don't know the benefits that they're entitled to.

One of the things that these programs do is teach the clinicians how to explain the benefits or where to go to get help or where to go to get resources. So, I think it's super important to make sure that all the vets or those that have served or have family members that served to understand the benefits that they get, because the government does offer a lot of special benefits for veterans, which is amazing.

Probably not as much as I wish they would, but Derrik and I'll always tell you that we should be doing more, right? There should never be a homeless vet. There should never be a vet that is struggling to get healthcare, in my opinion, those are the people we should take care of more than anybody else.

Looking at the future, what are the goals for these veteran programs? And how can others in the healthcare industry adopt these models to improve veteran care?

Derrik:
You know, I think Tom really just touched on it with what he said. We talk all the time; you see all the walks to end Alzheimer's. You see all sorts of different ways to earn the money to do this. We're lucky here in San Diego, we have Veterans Stand Down, which is a wonderful thing that helps give resources to veterans, whether it's food, clothes, whatever they may possibly need, or assistance getting them into lodging and stuff like that.

But the future is what Tom said earlier. There shouldn't be a homeless veteran. There should not be programs where we have to go into the community and give and help these veterans get into homes. There should be something set up where they're having these homes. They're able to get into these places.

It's absolutely that, that is the future. Sorry, it bugs me. It just bugs me to even think. I think the last time I saw any kind of walk was veterans’ day parade. As amazing as that is, it's not something that brings the attention that's needed.

I wish we could have more programs to help these wonderful men and women. They did so much for the freedoms that we're lucky enough to enjoy and celebrate and have each day. I would love to see not another homeless veteran. I don't want to see my brothers and sisters in arms suffering. I want them to be as happy as they can be.

We have to understand that these are different people. They've been through things; they've seen things that no one else can ever truly understand unless you've been through them yourselves.

And I just want them to be able to be as happy and supported as they possibly can be. And that's during life and even in death, I want them to be celebrated.

Tom:
Another thing that I think is really important, and they're kind of hit up this, but as we're a company, we want to build a culture. And as you're looking to build a culture, how do you build a culture that supports veterans? One of the things that Mission Healthcare did, and I'm super proud of, is, when you walk into the corporate office, sure, there's the Mission Healthcare logo and all that, but there's a wall.
It has two flags beside it, but there's a wall on everybody that works at Mission who has a family member or who has served with their picture on the wall. It rings out if you go to the corporate office or if you go to one of the branch offices.

You’ll see this wall of people that have served, people that are impacted by the military, whether it was your grandpa, your grandma, your sister, your brother, your mom, your dad. Most people have somebody in their family that has served in the military or over time. To have all these pictures up on the wall and honor those people that have served, one, and then two, for everybody that has to walk through that office looks at those pictures, and they all make fun or laugh at Derrik's picture of boot camp when he was 18 years old, looks like Derrik still.

But that picture means a lot to him, because no matter who you are, when you start through the military, after you get through boot camp, you get your picture taken. And that's one picture that you always keep. And so, I think culturally, as you look at the future, continuing to spread the message, continuing to talk about these programs and continuing to add that to the culture of businesses is super important.
And so, I think I've taken it on my shoulders, and I know Derrik's taking on his shoulders to continue, to think about that all the time. And how do we make sure that on Veterans Day or on, the Marine Corps birthday or the Navy birthday or the Army birthday. We sit and we stop and think about those people that serve for us.

Derrik:
I was going to say, Tom, you have that Navy birthday coming up, right? But, Shea, you had asked something earlier, and I totally forgot to answer that part of the question, but you asked about something that stands out with a patient or family.

A couple weeks ago we initiated this a couple months ago, but we've started bringing out the flags to have at bedside for when the veterans pass away. And I've actually been doing it personally here in San Diego until the clinicians have been properly trained. But then draping those flags over the deceased veteran. They call it the “last hug from the stars and stripes,” and as a veteran, it's really important to me. I've been to enough of those funerals, unfortunately. But to give that to these veterans, specifically this story, I got a call from our nurse for this specific patient at this community that I've been going to for years.

I've done pinning ceremonies there for years. It's always one of my best attendant ones. They always seem to have about 40, 50 veterans that are always at these ceremonies that we do for Veterans’ Day. This particular patient of ours had been there for a few years and was always the best dress guy at the ceremonies, was always the happiest, would always have four or five family members there.
And when my nurse called me and said, hey, you know, we think it's family would really like the flag. We think we only have days, basically, that he'll still be with us. So, I went out there and dropped off the flag, and the daughter was there.

She said, “oh, my God, Derrik, it's you.” And I have not talked to this daughter in like a year. I have not seen her. You know, I meet so many people when I do these ceremonies. She's like, “oh, my God, Derrik, it's you. I'm so glad it's you. I was hoping it would be you.” When they said the veterans, guy was going to be bringing the flag. You know, he was, he was there, was definitely showing signs of he was not going to be with us very long.

I was sitting there talking to the daughter and I gave her my work number as well as my personal. I was like, you call me. I know you're not leaving aside. You call me the second he passes, and I will be out here. About an hour later, I got a call from the daughter. He had just passed away, and I got right back out there.

I just picked up my dogs from daycare. It was like 5:30 at night. My dogs were in the car with me and went to the community. My nurse was already there starting the visit for the deceased veteran. Cleaned him up and everything else, and then I was able to drape the flag over him with the daughter right there and the peace that she had because he was so proud.

Every day he would walk by the veteran’s wall we did; he would see his photo up there in front of the flag. He was so happy. And just the peace of mind that this family had and, you know, the thanks. And I was able to get her another copy of his picture and everything else.

She's been calling me almost weekly. I've been helping her with getting him set up for his funeral out here at the military cemetery and everything else. But just the peace of mind that this family had, and this daughter had in that moment that her dad was honored and celebrated. He went out the exact way he would want it to with the American flag over him and proud and just happy. And I get messed up even just thinking about it, but it was just the pride she had and the moment there. She was actually able to be a proud daughter during probably the saddest moment of her life because she just lost her dad, but she was able to be a proud daughter in that moment. And the tears of joy that she had is something that will always stick with me.

So, especially being in the hospice world where we have these patients, they're not with us long. We only have one chance to get this right. We really do. So, to be able to make such a hard time, a beautiful moment for this veteran and this family was just something that really stands out to me recently.
Tom:

Great story. Thank you for sharing that. That's awesome. And thank you for doing that, for being there for her.

Derrik:
It is my pride. It is my pride. For sure. And that's one of those ways that we stand out, because it's just not, a lot of agencies really do stuff like that, and I will. I've done it at three in the morning. I don't care.
It's my way of saying thank you and giving these wonderful men and women their proper send off.

As we wrap up—again, thank you, Derrik. And thank you, Tom, for joining this. Are there any closing remarks that you guys want to make?

Tom:
I'll just say, thank you, Derrik, for sharing the stories and pushing the program. I think it's super important. Whether it's part of the American way. I love the story around the last hug from the stars and tribes, but that's an amazing story. And by the way, I want my last hug when it happens to me, just like you want your last hug when it happens to you.
We're all here for a short amount of time and being able to impact the veteran community is super important. I wish every hospice in the nation would fall in the same playbook and do these things. Just like Mission Healthcare has. So, with that, Shea, thanks for hosting us.

I know this one means a lot to you because your family served as well. Shea’s dad was in the navy, is that correct, Shay? He's in the navy. He'll be really happy to listen to this podcast, I'm sure. And super, uh, excited to share the story. So, Derrik, thank you.

Derrik:
Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for. Thanks for having me. And it just. Shea, thank you for hosting this. A big thank you to you as well, Tom. Tom and I will mess with each other. He's Navy, I'm army. We'll mess with each other, but best believe we'll have each other's backs.
We can mess with each other, but no one else can mess with us. That's kind of just the brotherhood that we have. you know, and it's. I'm really lucky to be at a company where, you know, our current CEO is a. Is former army. So, when I go to him and when I go to Tom and say, hey, I really want to do this, can I get your backing? I've never been told no. It's always been a quick, resounding yes. I'm just thankful.
It is really nice to have people that truly understand and have the same vision and want this to all, it's all for the betterment of these veterans’ lives, especially with the short time that we really get to have with them.

So, again, thank you for having me. Thank you for being a resource for me as well, Tom, I appreciate it. Shea, thank you again for doing this. I know we talked previously, I said thank you, but thank you again for giving me some hope of the current generation and the appreciation.
And please don't ever let that go. Don't ever let that go. It gives me hope as a 44-year-old man. It gives me hope to see the younger generation caring still. So, thank you.

Outro:
Thank you for listening to MHA Corner Podcast. If you would like to learn more about Maxwell Healthcare Associates, contact us at sales@maxwellhca.com or visit us at www.maxwellhca.com. To learn more about Mission Healthcare and their mission to meet the needs of veterans, visit www.homewithmission.com/.