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Finding Your People: Stories of Two Ethos Home Health Care Therapists

Published: March 21, 2022 | Reading Time: 3 minutes

Published: March 21, 2022
Reading Time: 3 minutes

A caregiver from Ethos Home Health Care, wearing a mask, assists an elderly woman using a walker in a cozy living room. The woman holds onto the walker while the therapist demonstrates a leg movement. Decorative pillows and wall art create a warm backdrop to their inspiring stories of care and support.

What Makes a Great Job? Doing Good, Being Recognized for It, and Loving the People You Work With

James Nelson and Corey Langerud came to Ethos from two different backgrounds, but they share the same goal: Doing the most good for people in need.

Ethos provides skilled care, therapy, and home care for patients in eastern North Dakota and West Central Minnesota. Services include chronic disease and medication management, physical, occupational, and speech therapy, all of which are aimed at recovery and day-to-day help with activities like dressing and grooming. Founded in 2014, Ethos is guided by Christian principles and a dedication to collaboration, stewardship, and integrity through caring and compassionate service.

Almost anyone can provide care, but it takes people who are driven to truly serve in order to provide healing. From the start, Ethos has focused on having the right people on our staff who do more than just help people with walking and range of motion. They are dedicated to the whole individual and making a difference in the lives of those they serve.

His Mom’s Recovery Journey Informed His Career Choice

When he was younger, James Nelson’s mom was in a car accident, and he watched her struggle through the rehab process. That struggle influenced how he saw the role of therapy, which he eventually dedicated his life to.

“The most rewarding part of my job is getting people better and helping them succeed in their homes,” he said. “With in-home care, we do a lot of helping people try to stay out of the hospital, resume their independence and get back to the community, and just overall help recover whether it’s mental or physical.”

But caring for people is just the start of it, he said. As a therapist, he can fine-tune treatment to present care options based on specific needs. That could include therapy so the patient can walk down the hallway to get to the kitchen to make dinner, and therapy so the patient can go out in the community and get their hair cut.

“Are you able to walk all the way to your doctor’s appointments down the long hallways with the doctor,” is a question that will be used to set therapy goals and processes, he said. “Are we trying to improve balance and reduce your falls? Are we trying to hopefully get you fall-free?”

But working at Ethos is more than just working with patients, he said.

“At Ethos, we all feel like a big family,” he said. “We all talk every day through email or through Zoom meetings. We do a lot of team communication with our clients. Ethos is also different because where a lot of therapists come from in the past, there are a lot of high productivity standards where at times they definitely feel like we really can’t meet those. And Ethos really gives us quality time with our patients. I feel like my work-to-patient ratio is appropriate, wherein a lot of other settings I’ve been in, you can barely get your job done.”

“The People Who Work at Ethos from the Very First Day I Met Them Were Fantastic”

Quality of care and time with patients are both important factors when finding a great place to work, but Corey Langerud, a physical therapist, found something else: Community.

Langerud came to Ethos from an in-patient care setting, and what he immediately liked about the job was that in physical therapy, therapists taught people to care for themselves.

“It’s nice to be able to empower people to do that so that if something pops up in the future, they don’t necessarily need our help again,” he said. “And it also enhances their life and makes them feel a little more empowered to take it into their own hands.”

Home health care, he said, focuses on what truly matters, with an emphasis on real-world abilities, getting up and down, walking, getting dressed, or showering.

This translates into more personal interactions, something which carries over into his relationships at work.

Corey Langerud

“You develop real friendships here,” he said. “And since I’ve been here, not a single employee has left. And I think that speaks a lot for the company. That the only time a position opens is when someone’s being promoted from within the organization or if they’re moving out of town or doing something like that. But nobody ever leaves to go somewhere else, and so I think that speaks a lot for the type of culture that they’ve created here at Ethos.”

Click here to learn more about careers and healthcare at Ethos.

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