Jared Carr, senior vice president of operations, north region, at Ignite Medical Resorts, has been named a 2024 Future Leader by Skilled Nursing News.
To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40-years-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors, and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.
Carr sat down with Skilled Nursing News to talk about family ties to the industry, how patience is key when starting out, and why nursing homes will be the new long-term acute care hospitals, if they aren’t already.
SNN: What drew you to this industry?
Carr: My father, he’s in the industry, as was my late grandfather, so it was a family thing. I grew up around the industry, seeing how we can help people, especially in the short-term rehabilitation side of things, when someone has a stroke or a cardiac incident, and they can come to us and heal and be able to walk out of there on their own two feet and go home. That’s rewarding. Long-term care has its rewards too, but being able to see people who are injured or sickly coming to us and then going home on their own made me proud to do the same thing that my dad and my grandfather did too.
SNN: What is the biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?
Carr: You can provide the best care possible, you can have the most beautiful building possible, but at the end of the day, people just want to be home. When they come to you, every resident, every guest, they automatically would rather be at home. It’s the comforts of home, and it’s hard for us when we start at a disadvantage. So, we have to add that customer service sense as a facility, that these people are in pain, they’re coming from the hospital nine times out of 10, and they’d rather be at home. We have to make their stay as enjoyable as possible and as meaningful as possible, until they get to go sleep in their own bed and then hug their dog and see their grandkids at home.
SNN: If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of skilled nursing, what would it be?
Carr: The regulatory oversight from state to state. There is a place for it, we need to be held accountable in the skilled nursing industry. But having more of a partnership with our local departments of public health, rather than an adversarial relationship, would benefit everybody, especially the residents, which is all that matters at the end of the day. Sometimes you get surveyors who may have a pre-existing bias or a vendetta against a certain building or a certain person. The more we can work together, and the more that surveyors can give us tips on how to be better operators, the better it is for the residents. Sometimes it’s just a hard, uphill battle with them.
SNN: What do you foresee as being different about the skilled nursing industry looking ahead to 2025?
Carr: Every year, the acuity that we’re able to accept in the skilled nursing facilities gets higher. If you look 10 years ago, or according to my dad, 20 or 30 years ago, what we can do as skilled nursing facilities today was unimaginable. Being able to take brand new tracheostomy patients or the extreme clinically complex patients with 10 liters of oxygen, that was a thing that only hospitals did back in the day, or long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs). The nursing homes are the new LTACHs. It’s just going to keep going in that direction. We need to keep training our staff to be able to take the highest acuity possible because if the hospitals are going to keep sending them to us, we have to make sure that we’re able to safely take care of them.
SNN: In a word, how would you describe the future of skilled nursing?
Carr: It’s a combination of exciting and complicated. We don’t know what the future holds with regulation; a lot of it depends on the presidential election and who’s in charge of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) next year. At the end of the day, the population is still aging, and we’re still needing to service all of these people, so we’re still going to have business to do, but it’s just a matter of what it’s going to look like.
SNN: What quality must all future leaders possess?
Carr: A sense of understanding is really important, because when it comes to families, or employees, you never know what someone has been through, and you never know what their background is. Allowing your employees to deal with their life outside of work will make them better employees, and at the end of the day, will allow them to take care of their residents better. One thing my dad always says is, happy employees create happy residents.
SNN: If you could give advice to yourself looking back to your first day in the industry, what would it be and why?
Carr: Be patient. When I was just getting out of college and getting my administrator’s license, I was very impatient. I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to run an annual survey. I wanted to hire people. I wanted to fire people. I wanted to be the boss and be the man. But you have to learn a little bit more and see a little bit more of the world of skilled nursing, before you have a chance to make those kinds of decisions that affect other people’s lives and affect your business. So patience is key, absolutely.
The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of behavioral health, senior housing, skilled nursing, home health, and hospice care. To see this year’s Future Leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.
To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.
