CLARKS SUMMIT — Aaron Musselman and Kari Baer, the new owners of the former Hospice Advantage, now known as Arcadia Hospice, are on mission.
The women are on mission to give their agency, located at 700 S. State St., the feel of a small business with the resources of a big company to take care of their patients and their employees, to integrate with the community and make their services available to those who need them most.
“Our plan is to hit all the under-served folks,” said Musselman. “Most of the people who need the most access to care and have the least of it are the folks that are veterans, folks that don’t exactly have a lot of funds, in nursing homes and assisted living. …They need the most care and are the least served.”
One way in which the owners seek to accomplish all of this is by simply leaving it in the hands of the people who see the needs first hand: their employees.
“I think the people in this office are always trying to think of cool ways to make people feel a little bit better, and that’s good to know,” Musselman said. “A lot of hospices are the same in terms of things that we are required to do by the government, but I think the little tweaks are the local specialized things that you do for people, and everybody has a little bit of a different twist to that.”
Currently, Arcadia Hospice has two full-time RNs, a social worker, a chaplain and a volunteer program. It also offers bereavement counseling.
And the company regularly delivers flowers to its patients.
Musselman explained Medicare requires five percent of a hospice hour to be completed by volunteers. “That’s the one thing that I think every hospice needs the most – folks who are willing to volunteer an hour of their time,” he said. “And it doesn’t necessarily have to be..caring medically for somebody. It could be playing board games with someone, it could be hanging out, reflective writing, it could be any number of things. And there’s just not enough of those good, kind-hearted people out there to go around who know about us.”
Anyone who would like more information about the volunteer program should call the office at 570-319-6485.
Musselman said he first entered the field of hospice “by accident” but is glad he did.
“I just wanted a different career change in healthcare, and there was a position open for a corporation doing sales for it,” he said.
“Honestly, you would think it’s a strange, morbid business to get into but what you realize very quickly when you do it, is you really get to meet some awesome people, who have done some cool things for this country, for their families and the area. And to help their family be even just a little bit more relaxed about what’s going on, or feel more prepared, or whatever we can do to help make things easier and keep a patient more comfortable, it actually ends up being one of the more rewarding things you could do.”
Baer’s story of how she entered the business is more of a personal quest, following her daughter’s death from a chronic illness in 1997.
“I remember thinking in 1997, ‘There’s got to be more than curative treatment,’” she said. “So I went on kind of a journey to find out what that ‘more’ was, and I ended up in hospice about 10 years ago.”
She, too, finds the career fulfilling.
“It is very rewarding to see that healthcare doesn’t always have to be curative,” she said. “Healthcare can be about comfort. Healthcare can be patient directed. Healthcare can be all about the patient directing their own plan of care and how they want their end of life to look.”
