Dear, John (Oliver)

First, let me say thanks for what you attempted to do in your segment about the long-term care profession in a recent episode of Last Week Tonight. If I take the most gracious interpretation of the story's intent, it is to create a positive difference in the lives of seniors. Your plate-lusting jokes aside, I can sift through the awkwardly humor-laced sensation of the story to surmise a positive end - a call for us to be better.

Got it.

I'll take it from here.

We, the overwhelming majority of senior care professionals who have spent years, decades, and entire careers to care for seniors do not condone bad behavior in our industry. Regardless of whether we work in non-profit or for-profit businesses in senior care, most of us are working with fervent dedication to a cause and not a fat paycheck.

If bad actors exist in our field as surely they do in others - say, for example... oh I don't know, for-profit cable networks - they certainly do not represent the entire field.

I have many hard-earned criticisms of my own profession, but in the kind of way that someone passionate about staying in that profession can have. Like many of my colleagues, I waver in and out of frustration only to be renewed in my resolve to create positive and lasting change.

After you finished reading the story into your camera and moved your attention to the next set of stories, our hearts remain glued to this field you tore into. It isn't that your "reporting" was false. I'm sure those chosen statistics, cited sources, and news clips were factual. But it was a callous observation by a disinterested passerby - a drive by rebuke of something you have not given your heart to before and will not revisit again.

I have some not-so-sensational, non-newsworthy stories of my own.

• I have stood in a hallway crying and embracing a daughter who just lost her dear mother, and the staff, residents and other families nearby just respectfully waited to pass, because they understood what was happening.
• I have helped a retired Colonel, a proud man who has led thousands of soldiers in some of the worst scenarios imaginable and somehow still lived into old age, to clean himself after going to the bathroom, because his hands weren't working well that day.
• I have worked 14 and 16 hour days during hurricanes to help displaced residents from senior living communities in cities hours away that were evacuated and needed somewhere to go.
• I have cooked breakfast while wearing an N95 mask that caused sores behind my ears, and then moments later sat with a resident who, regardless of COVID protocols or not, didn't have any family that visited her. So we became her family - like too many seniors like her experience long before the pandemic.

Multiply these kinds of stories by hundreds of thousands of fellow professionals for years - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. So your 22 minutes segment was a little short by a few million hours worth of stories.

You shared stories about "senior dumping". Do you know who is the most frequent intake location for an "abandoned" senior? Senior care facilities. The culprits? Families.

You implied that for-profit businesses are to blame for a broken aged care system. Sure, there's probably a top percentile of owners and executives who are raking in millions of dollars a year. I don't like that either. I think misaligned incentives, distant C-suite executives who never step foot into a community, and the capital sources who view senior living as a real estate investment are all areas we need to change.

But, do you know what would likely happen if for-profit senior care businesses just went away? The immediate and overwhelming strain to hospital systems, homeless shelters, and other places unprepared to do what we strive to do. You want to know who is actually undertrained in providing memory care? - almost EVERYONE else outside of senior living communities.

Ever seen a waiter at a restaurant try to navigate how to take an order from a person living with advanced Alzheimer's disease? I have. Good senior communities do more than provide a video training on dementia to new employees. We work side by side with our teams to battle the disease every day while loving the person living with the disease.

Does your show provide dementia care training to your staff? No? Maybe you're thinking, "well, we're not a memory care facility. You are - that's your job." Actually, integrating seniors (regardless of their care needs) into the daily fabric of the greater communities in which we live is everyone's job.

If you are really interested in helping and not hyping, I want to pass along an open invitation that one of my friends in the industry shared. You have an open invitation, John Oliver, to come stay in any one of our industry's senior living communities and see what we do yourself. To inject a little fairness, I'd say choose a senior living place at random rather than one from your segment. I'd bet there's a 99.5% chance that your experience will not align with any of the sample stories you shared.

To borrow a famous transition phrase from you, "and now this..."

The worst part of how I feel in the aftermath of watching your segment is knowing how insanely cruel the COVID pandemic has been in the senior care profession. The majority of our workforce is frontline staff made up of caregivers, nurses, housekeepers, cooks, and local community managers. If you haven't heard of compassion fatigue, that might make for an interesting topic for your show.

For the seniors who live in our homes, communities, and facilities and have had to endure this crisis of a past year apart from their families, we stepped in as surrogates as best we could. And by "we" I mean the frontline. If you had spent the past year - even just one week - as a caregiver in an assisted living community and then reported your personal experience, I'd be more interested.

In all seriousness, you segued from a tragic story of an alligator incident with a senior directly into parodying a senior living company commercial to include that tragedy as a punchline? I missed the joke.

As it stands, I realize that my challenge with your story isn't what it tried to expose but what it exploited. Cheap fears, cherry-picked worst of the worst stories, and inattention to things you were actually close to shedding productive spotlights on (ex: Medicare rating system, lack of resources for unpaid caregiving done by families) or could have talked about (ex: the effects to mental health in both employees and seniors during COVID, the marginalization of aging/seniors and destructive ageism throughout society in general, or just do the entire segment on plates that turn you on.) All of those might have been better uses of the segment.

At a time when the rest of the world should be thanking frontline workers, true servant leaders, and the best of us in an already misunderstood industry, your story didn't change the hearts of the bad apples. It just made the good apples feel pretty rotten.

At a time when our already weary hearts are desperately fanning air onto the last bits of ember to keep striving to do our jobs, your great, big bucket of piss just made it a little harder to feel pride in our work. But persist we will.

At a time when families who have loved ones living in senior care facilities are grappling with their guilt of not being able to see them because of COVID - you haven't given them a rallying cry to "seek broader, governmental oversight". You've simply metastasized their guilt using fear.

But I suppose it is nothing new. We are all mostly used to outside people only talking about senior care when there's a "juicy, shameful" story to tell. So, I guess we'll see you the next time something crazy and newsworthy happens.

In the meantime, the rest of us will keep picking up the pieces of ourselves to muster another round in the arena and then another after that and the next one after that.

Most of us in the senior care profession are acutely cognizant of what impact we're trying to make to counteract the way in which much of our society views older adults and then criticizes those to whom they have delegated their own responsibilities. It's like handing your baby to a stranger and then yelling at the stranger for being a bad mom. If you really want to make a change, come join us. We'll be the ones standing in the frontline.