What surprising truths has a year of podcasting unveiled about nursing home abuse? Reflecting on the episodes from 2024, it’s clear that the fight for justice in elder care is fraught with complex challenges and pivotal lessons. From uncovering systemic issues to sharing powerful survivor stories, each episode has deepened the understanding of what it takes to protect our most vulnerable. In this week’s episode, nursing home abuse attorney Rob Schenk discusses the key insights and unforgettable moments from hosting the podcast this year, emphasizing how these revelations are shaping the battle against nursing home abuse.

Things I Learned from Hosting this Podcast in 2024

Schenk: 

All the things that I learned from hosting this podcast in the year 2024. Stick around.

Hello out there. Welcome back to the nursing home abuse podcast. My name is Rob. I’ll be your host for this episode and. If everything goes according to plan this episode, if you’re listening to it on the day of publication, it is Monday, December 23rd. So I figured that this would be a good week to do a self indulgent episode and talk about the things that I learned from doing this episode this podcast in over the past year.

And I say that as though it’s strange, but like I batch record these. Months and months in advance. So this is like one of the first times that I’m actually recording something and it come out relatively quickly after that. That’s a very, it’s a rarity for this podcast. So anyway So hopefully it’s the holiday season.

Maybe you’re listening to this driving to a relative’s family house. I don’t know, but this is not going to be a normal episode. It’s not even like things that I’ve learned that are actually substantive to nursing home abuse. It’s not as though I’m going to talk about, Hey, you can go to get PBJ information off of the CMS website.

It’s just general things about. People in humanity that I’ve learned from interviewing people, almost 50 people this year on the podcast. So the first thing that I learned is that. My objectives shifted with this podcast. The objective of this podcast is now a little bit different than when I first started at the very beginning and even at the beginning of this year.

Switch in Podcast Objective

So when the podcast first started, I envisioned the audience as families of of people that have a loved one in a nursing home, right? So maybe your loved one is experiencing multiple UTIs and you go and you Google it and this podcast comes up, you listen to it, you get informed and you never listen to another episode ever again.

That was what I was envisioning for the podcast. And so I wasn’t ever trying to build an audience. I wasn’t, my expectation was that somebody would get the information they need as quickly as possible and then go on. It wasn’t my intent to build any type of audience. And then over the course of, of the years and over the course of this year, it seemed to me that the audience wasn’t necessarily a large portion of the audience wasn’t necessarily a family member of a nursing home resident.

It was an attorney, a nurse an ombudsman. This was my audience. And it seemed that the audience, these particular categories of people, We’re listening over and over on a weekly basis. My audience was growing. It wasn’t one off situation. So my objective changed. I wanted to actually, now I want to actually create content for these people.

I want to create content to make, Attorney’s better. I want to make content that makes the nurses, but I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know qualified to do that, but I want to have conversations that perhaps start other conversations or have conversations that I would want to listen to.

Maybe when I first started off, first started out, or even right now. But that’s the objective change. I don’t have a better way of saying it than that. So rather than approach a topic from a 40, 000 foot view for a lay person, I wanted to start getting a little bit deeper under the surface of certain things.

So case in point is that I believe that I want to say that we’re, I’m taking a week off, is that right? Let me see. Yes. So. The, after the next episode will be January 6th. If everything goes according to plan and that episode will feature Martha Kelso and Karen Kennedy Evans for a real deep dive into the Kennedy terminal ulcer.

This is just by way of example. So rather than scratch the surface of stuff, I’m starting to get a little bit deeper into it. So that makes, I think the conversations. A lot more interesting to listen to and on, from my standpoint, a little bit more fun to, to do. So that’s the first thing I’ve learned that, as I’m floating down this river of podcast host the purpose has changed because the audience I’ve realized the audience has changed.

Willingness to Share Knowledge

The next thing is this, and To me, this is a real life lesson. And I hope to model the behavior of some of the guests that have come on here, but I feel like the willingness to share your knowledge is congruent to the amount of knowledge that you have. And what I mean by that is I feel if you’ve made it to the mountaintop the likelihood of you wanting to share your knowledge with people that don’t have as much as you.

Is higher. The likelihood that you’re going to do that as higher, the likelihood that you’re going to want to share what little information you have when you’re first starting off is high as well. So in other words, like if I, um, if you’re just starting off, you don’t know anything, but what you do know, you’re happy to give to somebody else, like obviously hoping to reciprocate, but also at the same time, it’s like, it’s new, it’s fresh.

Like I want to learn, I want to teach you, even though I don’t know anything. And then at the at the quote unquote, into the journey, once you’ve have a lot of experience, it’s that same thing. I am I now know that I don’t know everything and I’m willing to share and I’m still willing to learn, but in the middle.

I feel like there is a time in our journeys as attorneys or maybe anything where we, our ego says we’ve put in a lot of time, we’ve worked really hard and what we have is ours. It’s not yours. And we’re less willing to share what we have because what we believe that we’ve acquired something that’s exclusive to us.

And I’ve found that. There have been instances in which people refuse to come on the show because they think they have a secret sauce. People refuse to answer certain questions because they think that there’s a certain way that they’re doing it that if the cat’s out of the bag then it’s, they’re toast.

And I feel like in my experience with this, it’s people that are in that middle territory. They have good experiences, they’re good attorneys, they’re good nurses, these are good people or not good. I’m experienced and competent, but I don’t know I feel like at some point people turn her back and look and go, I need to share what I have.

And that is, I 100%, I guess I never, I saw it in my life. But hosting this show, being the somebody that interviews people and begs people to come onto the show to share knowledge. I see more and more. I’ve had people come onto the show and then once they realized that it wasn’t a it was going to be public facing, like this wasn’t just a conversation between them and the person that they didn’t want to do it.

And then I’ve had people like Lance Lurie. I’ve had people like Roger Dodd people like who else? I don’t leave my out Jeff Helms that these are master trial attorneys. Master trial attorneys and you, I could walk up to on the street and they would talk to me for four hours. They have no problem sharing what they have.

So I can only hope that I achieve that level where I’ve never have a problem sharing what I know with somebody and that I never have a problem with that. So I don’t know I don’t know. That was a little bit touchy feely, but it’s, I don’t know. In my experience, I found that to be true.

Letting Go of Ego

People that don’t want to share. Tend to fall in that middle realm. They have, they’re not new, but they’re not, they don’t have gray hair. I would say the next lesson that I’ve learned interviewing people, hosting a show is to let go of ego. And it goes right along with what I was just saying about the willingness to share.

Learning in Front of Others

I have to be willing. To show that I don’t know things. So what I mean by that is, um, like for the first few years of this podcast, 2016, 2017, I’m asking questions. I want to know the answer. I have no idea. I have to be willing to learn in public. Like I have the questions that I ask, I want to know it’s not a lot of times I’m asking questions.

I know the answer I’m doing it as the benefit I’m acting on behalf of the audience. A lot of times that’s not true. I’m at, if I want to know, Hey, how does the, how does a pressure injury, the idiom the ideology of the pressure injury work? Like I’m actually asking that question. In other words, like I have to let go of the thought in my mind.

That if I ask this question, perhaps I don’t look as smart as I should look. And that was difficult. That’s difficult because, also at the same time, perhaps opposing counsel is watching this show. I doubt it by the numbers, perhaps somebody that might want to hire me is watching the show or my community is watching the show.

I don’t want to look like a dumb. I have to let go of that. I have to be confident in what I know and what I don’t know and not be afraid To ask the question, but most certainly in, in episodes, even up to probably last week, there’s going to be questions that I’m asking. And it’s like, how do you say you don’t know X without saying you don’t know X.

And it’s a and it shows in the questions that I ask. And certainly at the very beginning of the program, if you can listen and say, Oh, he clearly doesn’t know what he’s, what he doesn’t know this. You just have to be not afraid. To put yourself out there and to be ignorant. It’s okay. And I used to, it used to make me mad sometimes when I would go to see Elise, I would attend lectures or seminars and clearly.

The smartest woman or the smartest man in the room giving the lecture, they would say things like, I don’t know. And they would do these ridiculous hedgings. I’m just not sure. You guys are much smarter than me about a lot of this stuff. I’m like, shut the F up.

Like you’re clearly the most competent experienced person, but I don’t think that way anymore. The, if it’s the, you have to know that there’s a quadrant of knowledge, which is that things that you don’t know that you don’t know that you don’t know them. And the more I’ve done this show, the more I’ve realized that there’s an, a vast amount of information in that quadrant of knowledge.

And and so when someone is truly hedging what they know, And they appear extremely knowledgeable. That’s probably why. And I completely don’t get super mad about that anymore. But just allowing, not having my ego get in the way of asking questions that I want to know the answer to that I want my audience to know the answer to.

That’s been something that I’ve had to learn over the course of this past year. The next thing that I’ve learned. Is that there are certain people out there that don’t want to come on the show or it’s much more difficult to get them on the show. So for the first few years of this show. I really wanted to talk to academics, the people that are producing papers, the people that are the the professors, the physicians the PhDs that put out, studies and things like that.

I would, I subscribe to the service to get the papers. I read them. And then, how that works, like there’s 1 paper and it might have 15 authors. And so we would send out. Thousands of invites to come on the show, everything from like, how does blood thinners affect the body after a fall, for example, things like that.

And and we’re sending out thousands of invitations to these academics that have written these papers and no one comes in the show out of a thousand invites, I might get one response. Out of a thousand, I might get one and that’s been the case for a long time. But now that the objective of the program has shifted, now I can throw a baseball and hit somebody that wants to come on this show.

Or maybe that’s just the status of podcasts now, cause I’m talking about 2016, 2017 through 2023, is that it was difficult to get anybody to come on the show, but most specifically academics. Now. Attorneys come on, can come on the show left and right. And I guess now that I’m actually talking out loud about that, maybe that’s the status of podcasts.

That’s not true because I’m still sending a lot of email invites out to academics, these authors of papers, and no one wants to come on the show. So that’s something that I’ve learned. Like you can’t. I don’t know, maybe it’s the name of the show. I even actually thought about changing the name of the show to like nursing home safety or nursing home today or something like that.

Cause maybe it was the nursing home abuse podcast and that I’m a plaintiff’s attorney. That’s why the academics were coming on the show. But I don’t know if that’s the case. But at any rate the next thing I would say is that you can’t do this alone. 

The Value of Teamwork

I have a great. Team of people that help me every week with this.

I have a great kind of video editor. Savant, Christine who does a great job with this show. She’s the one that does all the graphics, things like that. She does the video editing, puts everything onto social media. I know the cat’s out of the bag because for a long time as a running joke, because I was the only one that did anything with this podcast.

In other words, I was the one that booked the guests, filmed it. Edited it, did most of the work to make it seem like this podcast was a much bigger deal than it was speaking of ego I would, we would, me and will, my former cohost, former law partner, we would make up that there was a guy named gene who was our producer.

So even to this day, when I say that I want something queued up, I say gene. But in reality, Jean is actually at this time, Christine, who’s been doing a fantastic job in this program for the past year. And Erica I know that Erica did a lot of work. Erica is my sister in law. I got, yeah, my sister in law.

I don’t know why I had to think about that. Sister in law and she does a lot of great work trying to get the guests to come on the show. She’s the one that sends thousands of emails, but at any rate, it takes a team to get this thing up and running. I guess a couple of things. about the show before I go.

I’m thinking about there’s if you had a drinking game, I don’t even know why I’m saying this. If there’s a nursing home abuse podcast drinking game, I think that the, you take a drink. Whenever I mentioned the Mount Rushmore of nursing home attorneys in Georgia, I think that if you were to like do, if you do use Chat GPT to figure out like, what’s the most quoted phrase that I say on this podcast.

I think it’s that, I think it’s Mount Rushmore of nursing home attorneys in Georgia. It used to be that I was in a band or that I worked at old Charlie’s or that my former law partner will was a CNA for 10 years. There’s just certain things that I feel like come up every episode.

That’s the drinking game. And I guess that’s about it. The only other thing I would say that I’ve learned is that my best friends, I feel like the best conversations that I have on the program come from people that can recognize that the, Long term care state survey or manual is the book behind me on one side and the very rare 1 percent that knows that’s the Georgia Trialers Association trial handbook on the other side of me.

My best friends are those that can be like, Oh, that’s the state surveyor manual behind us. The watermelon book. Those typically, those conversations typically tend to go very well in my opinion. I think that’s about it. I’m actually giving Christine, not a lot of work to do this week, but I hope that you’ve enjoyed the podcast over the course of 2024.

The plan is to keep it going into 2025. I believe we have episodes recorded. Through February or March of 2025, meaning that I think I recorded a whole bunch all the way through, I think, June of this year that have yet to come out yet, but after that it will be like a new season. So a new season will be starting.

And I guess early March of 2025. So I’m thinking about ways to make the podcast better. So I think I’m going to get rid of the chat GPT joke of the week. Wah. I’m sorry, everybody. I, I feel like that is underperforming and well, and if it, in terms of at least my corner of the podcast world, I think it’s underperforming.

I don’t, it didn’t have the legs that I thought it would. If you disagree, let me know, but. I think I’m going to get rid of the CHAT GPT generated nursing home regulation joke of the week. I think I’m going to replace it with something else, perhaps trivia of the week. I don’t know. I haven’t, we haven’t, as of today, we haven’t decided yet.

Let me know if you want me to keep the question of the week. If that is something that, you look forward to or something that you’re keeping score of, let me know. And if there’s, again, if there’s any guests that you want to see, if you yourself want to be a guest, let me know.

It’s much, much easier to get guests now the, for the first time, I think, since I’ve been doing this for several years I’m now getting solicited quite often for people to come on the show, which is a it’s a welcome site for Erica, who’s the one that has to send the thousands of emails out.

So anyway so if you have any topics that you want me to address, if you have any guess that you would like for me to talk to, let me know. But we’ll keep on, you keep on eating them, we’ll keep on making them. I hope that 2025 is a great year for you. And with that folks, I guess we will see you not next week.

What’s hang on let’s do this. I’m going to do this in real time with you because right now, as I record this, it’s a little bit, it’s mid December. So we’re going to have no episode on the 30th. And come back on the six. So we’re not going to see you next week. We’re going to see you the week after that in the new year in 2025.

And with that. We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to the Nursing Home Abuse Podcast. Nothing said on this podcast, either by the host or the guest, should be construed as legal or medical advice, nor is intended to create an attorney client relationship between the host or their guest and the listener. New episodes for now are available every other Monday on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast app, as well as on YouTube and our website, nursing home abuse podcast.com.

Again, that’s nursing home abuse podcast.com. See you next time.