In this episode of The Heals Pod, I had the pleasure of interviewing Terri Bruesehoff from Nurse Corps. Terri shared her journey of moving to Las Vegas and her extensive experience in the healthcare industry, spanning over 40 years. She discussed her background in nursing, starting as a CNA at the age of 16 and progressing to various roles in hospitals, school nursing, public health nursing, and home healthcare.
Terri highlighted the importance of home healthcare, especially in the current trend where individuals prefer to receive care in the comfort of their homes. She emphasized the need for coordination and continuity of care, especially in complex cases involving ventilators, trachs, and G-tubes. Terri also discussed the new concierge care program at Nurse Corps, catering to the needs of adult patients and offering personalized, high-quality care.
The conversation delved into the challenges and rewards of home healthcare, the importance of building relationships with patients and healthcare providers, and the significance of integrating Western and Eastern medicine practices. Terri shared her passion for problem-solving and putting together the pieces of the healthcare puzzle to ensure optimal patient outcomes.
As the Director of Concierge Services at Nurse Corps, Terri discussed the future of home healthcare, including potential expansions into transport services for private jet travelers and hotel guests needing specialized care. She also touched on the role of AI in healthcare, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach to medicine and the integration of alternative therapies.
Throughout the episode, Terri’s dedication to providing exceptional care and her commitment to innovation in the healthcare industry shone through. Listeners were encouraged to reach out to Nurse Corps for more information on their services and to benefit from their expertise in home healthcare.
Full Transcript
DIEGO TRUJILLO:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Diego Trujillo for another episode of The HEALS Pod, here with Terri Bruesehoff that has come to be able to share a little bit about the organization she works for and also a little bit about you. How are you doing today, Terri?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: I am fabulous. How are you today?
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I’m doing excellent. You know, we always like to dig into, as we do the interviews, it’s not just about the companies, because no one’s trying to listen to a 45-minute commercial, but the people behind the companies, right?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Absolutely.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: The people that are delivering. I’ve known you for about three years now, five years. I give these short dates and then people remind me how long and I’m like, wow, time is flying.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Listen Diego, it’s been 50 years. What do you mean?
DIEGO TRUJILLO: How dare you? How dare you? So you’ve been in this community for how long? Tell us a little bit about Las Vegas. What brought you here? What was the choice? What was the scenario?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh my gosh. I love it here. I started off in Philadelphia 20 years and then I moved to California for 20 years. Then Hawaii for 18 years. Okay. Where I lived on a sailboat and blah, blah, blah. And then I moved here five years ago.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So you went from the ocean directly to the desert. Yes. And what is your favorite of all four? Oh man, everyone.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: And why is it Las Vegas? Everyone is different. I love Las Vegas because I love to sail and boat. I love the hiking. I love the mountains. There’s so much to do here for free. Yeah. And you can really connect and get grounded here because there’s a lot to do. The desert is just mysterious and marvelous all at the same time.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: You know, we recently went on a night hike. It was very funny as we’re like going on this hike. We went to the hot springs. Oh, yes. Gold Strait hot springs.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: At night? Yeah.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Wow. Oh, it’s gorgeous at night. And I have LED lights we lay out. And so we’re going, we’re hiking in and we run into these two young men that are going in as well. And they ask, so what time do they close here? I know, and I was like, you guys don’t hike very much, do you? We are fortunate. I was like, yeah, they don’t close it. It’s the desert. It’s a wonderful thing.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: It really is.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And I would be honest, growing up here, I really don’t feel, but this might be a personal bias thing, obviously, because I like hiking, but a lot of people don’t really appreciate the nature that is around here.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Some people don’t even know.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, I travel a lot. Every time we travel, right, in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, we’d go hiking, and people would be like, well, so where’s your favorite place to hike? Gold Strike. Well, where’s that? It’s by Hoover Dam. It’s a 30-minute drive. People don’t know. They’ll see pictures and be like, where did you take that picture? Oh, that’s only an hour away.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: And then we’re tromping in the snow, you know, I’m tromping in the snow five feet up to my waist because we have so much snow. We are so blessed.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, I agree with you on that. I really, after getting into outdoor sports, and like I tell people, my vice is hiking in the outdoors. Anything that has to do with that, getting away, there’s no better feeling. We recently got back from Death Valley, and we had a friend that came from San Francisco who grew up here, and he goes, you know what? I never thought I’d say this, but I really meant the desert. He goes, there’s something different about the desert than all the trees. And I say, yeah, they’re called no insects.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: No, insects. Just the coyotes and the snakes and the turtles.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Listen, coyotes all run. When people ask me, because I’ll night hike a lot, and they’re like, well, what about the coyotes? If you manage to see them, they’ll run away. Though I think we’ve been stalked twice by a cat. We’ve caught its eyes at night. I’ll have to show you after. So you came to Las Vegas, and what did you do during this entire time period that you were traveling in different places?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: I have been in health care since way before you were born. I started off when I was 16 in 1977 as a CNA, working in the hospitals, and then I got my RN-BSN degree, and I started off in the hospitals, ICU, CCU, ER, became hospital administrator, and then I went into, after that, I went into school nursing at a private school in Hawaii, 1,500 kids, and then went into public health nursing, and then into home healthcare.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Wow, so you’ve seen a variety of nursing. I have. And you’ve gone, it’s very interesting listening to your answer right now, right? You started out in private care, direct patient care. Yes. You moved away from that. Yes. And then you circled back. Can I ask you why? What made you circle back? What was it about the home care?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: This is what’s going on about home healthcare. This is the trend. Everybody wants to, stay at home, be at home, die at home. They want to be near their family. We can make such an impact having the right nurses and CNAs in the home to give people the biggest impact, the quality of life, and make them as independent as possible.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, you know, and I agree. There used to be, I don’t know if it was generational. I believe I was listening a while back, right? The generational attachment to, for example, big chains. So the old generation used to be very attached to these big chains, Applebee’s, you know, Sizzler. And the larger the corporation, well, they must be doing something right. And younger people went the complete opposite way of that, right? And I think as the care comes home, pardon the pun, but as the care comes home, I think one of the main drivers for that, I mean, we see it with COVID infections within facilities. Sometimes I’ll talk to people and they’ll be very frustrated and be like, well, you know, my grandmother went into this facility and she got MRSA or C. diff. And I was like, well, that’s where sick people go. That’s where you’re going to gather all the sickness because they’re all in the same place. So having that kind of, not just isolation, but not being around as many infections, but being able to be in the comfort of your home. A lot of people fight for that a long time.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: We had a big influx of patients coming home during COVID, and it was amazing to hear people would call us and say, my mother is in the hospital and we can’t see her. She’s in the nursing home. She’s in a long-term care. And literally, We would go outside the window crawling along the dead rats so we can knock on the window and say, hi, how are you? Because they weren’t allowed to go in. And they found that their parents were dying because of lack of touch.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And I, you know, I think a lot of people, the automatic assumption is they have more equipment and tools here. It must be safer for me here should anything happen. Do you ever experience that as you’re speaking with people and you’re discussing that with families?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes. When we were, when these families were asking if we could take their loved family member home on a ventilator, trach, and G-tube. Many of the facilities didn’t understand that we were capable of doing that. They said, oh no, you have to be in the facility. So it was a great time to educate facilities and the long-term care facilities about what we can do at home and work together to get that patient home safely.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Well, and I think with technology, right, those things have all changed. If you went back to when you first started your career, you talk about taking someone home on a ventilator. That might have seemed a little bit difficult, but it seems like those circumstances may have changed now.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Absolutely. We can do ventilators, trachs, G-tubes, wound care, and it really takes a collaboration, though. of all the different entities, of your doctors, your nurses, your case managers, your respiratory therapy. It doesn’t take one person, it takes the group of us to get a person home safely and being in compliance.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: You do a lot more than just simply put a nurse there then. It sounds like you guys are orchestrating, you’re quarterbacking, you’re trying to kind of bring everyone together around that.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: That’s what I love doing. I was just going to ask you that. I love putting together a puzzle.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Is it that, yeah, sometimes the chaos, I don’t want to say chaos, but chaotic nature of trying to organize an orchestra, right, and bring everyone together to where it comes off on perfection.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Absolutely. We just had two scenarios just recently. The patient was going home, He wanted to be at a certain place. Can you make it happen? We need 24-7 nurses around the clock. They’re going to need IVs, this, this. They need a dietician. He wants a life coach. And I go, just bring it on, because I love putting the pieces together and saying, we can do this. Let’s work together. And we’ve been able to take quite a few patients home. and give them that full care, not just the nursing piece, but the PT, the OT, the ST, a dietician, a nutritionist, whatever they’re looking for. That is what we’re developing this concierge program. We call it concierge, giving them what they want and working together with them to give them peace of mind that we can do that.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And the organization you work for now is Nurse Corps. Yes. So concierge care is a separate branch of what Nurse Corps is offering.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes, because Nurse Corps has been here for 15 years. Predominantly, we’ve been known for the pediatrics line. We can take pediatric patients home on ventilators, trachs, and G-tubes. We can do the hourly care. We can do visits, IV visits, wound care. pick lines, all that stuff. So that’s been our bread and butter. We’ve been known for that. And then we branched out since 2019. And especially during COVID, we branched out to bring more people home, more adults home, and provide them this, what we call a concierge service. Basically, tell us what you want and we’re going to make it happen for you.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: That’s really interesting because you’re really being able to cater people. You know, again, my background was always you got to meet the patient where they’re at. You got to meet them where they, and that’s literally what you’re doing on a constant basis.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Exactly.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Listening to them tell you this is where I want to go and then making that happen.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Right. We can transport patients to another state. We just got a request for that this morning. We work very closely with your hospice entities because they do the visits, but we can do the continuity of care. We can do it. We call out here. private duty nursing, that’s hourly care. We can provide that piece for the hospice that they cannot provide, and we work closely with them. We’re partnering with a lot of hospices and PCA companies because we provide the CNA, the LPN, and the RN.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So you do everything else. So you’re figuring out this formula. How new is this concierge care program?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: It’s very new. The brochure you’re looking at is about two weeks old.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Oh, okay, so it really is coming fresh off the press.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Fresh off the press, and I’m visiting concierge doctors, and we’re partnering with PCA companies, concierge physicians, our facilities, and I have very good friends in this community because we do a lot of networking. I have good friends that have the same type of business, that are in the same type of business, they’re marketing, we’re in the same role. We meet for coffee and we get together because there is not enough. There’s enough for everybody. We must do continuity of care. We must do coordination of care. If I can’t provide the service, I’m going to call my good friend over here and say, maybe you can do a better job.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Seeing you’re one of those, when we used to talk in marketing back in the day, right? I would always make a joke, right? There’s certain people that are just pen droppers. They just come into the office and here’s an item for you to remember us by. And those people that really get out there and try to be a resource, not just knowing all of the different resources that exist, but you are one of the people that, hey, Terry, do you know somebody that can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? And if I didn’t know them, you would definitely know them, right? And I love doing that. Yeah, you fill in. It really helps us become stronger as a community. In the very end, who wins?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: The patient wins. The patient wins. And we sleep well at night knowing that we’ve made a difference. Absolutely. And when I lived in Hawaii, I started a staffing and home care agency, and my boss always said, Terry, go out there and you have to form the relationship first before you get the business. That’s the Hawaii way. Yeah. And I’ve carried that here. I love networking with friends, becoming friends, networking, becoming business partners. Health care, as you know, is low on the list here. We’re like number, I don’t know, 48th? We’re 48th. That’s kind of scary. And we can’t retain physicians. We can’t recruit enough. So we must build up our health care system. The only way to do that is working together and advocating for better health care.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Seeing recently, I was listening to a study, because everyone always assumes it’s Medicaid rates, Medicaid rates. And I do believe that they may play a part, right?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes, they do.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: But one of the things that was very interesting, recently on a graduating class of physicians, the one reason they didn’t want to stay here wasn’t Medicaid. It was too difficult to coordinate care.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Coordination of care.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And I was like, wow, that’s not a grant issue. That’s not a funding issue. That’s just us simply getting along with each other and working together for better outcomes for our patients.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: And I will tell you, when I used to, if I go, let’s, for instance, when I would go into an NICU to bring a baby home, the first thing I did was come up with a discharge planning tool. And everybody was aware that we needed to have the doctors and the case managers having a team meeting, and I would start talking to the parent about what we need to do, their go-to bag, what’s gonna happen when we go home, visit the home, how are we gonna set up, do you have enough electricity, where are you gonna put the ventilator? And so as the patient knew and the family knew that they were going to be discharged, I started coordinating this with different people. And it makes such a difference. So on the day when the ambulance shows up, we’re all ready to go. And it’s not just a half-baked discharge.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, absolutely. Things are done thoroughly. And again, you bet those better outcomes. And I’m sure working as long as you have now in the community, you’ve heard the stories. Yes. I remember one time hearing a story of a patient being transported home on hospice, and there was no one there. By the time the nurse from the company got there, the patient’s spouse was dragging the person across the front entrance, trying to get them back into the car to take them to the hospital.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Horror story.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And it was just heartbreaking to me to think that no one would be there to just say, hey, everything’s OK. This is part of the process. This is what we do. Not dragging, right? But getting them settled in at home. There’s something nice to being relieved. A lot of people, especially us in health care, sometimes we forget how scary it can be when you don’t know what’s happening. Right. We walk these experiences on a day-to-day basis, working with patients. And sometimes people forget that they’re not used to this. So for us, it’s, oh, this isn’t a big deal, right? That’s just the sound they make. Or that’s what it sounds like when you do this. But the families don’t know that. And they’re not only dealing with the stress of what’s going on, but the fact that it’s all unknown to them.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yeah. One of my favorite things to do is I’m the ambulance chaser. So I’m at the hospital at the point of discharge, and then the family goes and I go, I’m going to chase you home. I will be there. So when you’re bringing in your mom, home. I’m going to be there and I’m going to walk you through it. I’ve got your water bottles. I got some food bars for you because you haven’t eaten all day. Now we’re getting you home and our admissions nurse will show up and do the admission. Our clinical supervisor or clinical director and then our nurse taking care of that patient’s going to show up. So now someone’s taking care of the patient, the admission’s taking place with the paperwork, and I have now passed the baton over, and we’ve given them tools to succeed instead of them turning around and going back to the ER within 24 hours.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: It allows them like a type of continuity. Yes. Right? It’s not just being kind of tossed like a football, but rather hand it off, like you said, like a baton.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I love doing that. So, and this is your full-time job. What do you do with Nurse Corps specifically?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, I’m the Director of Concert Services. So, Director of Marketing. So, you’re building out this program. I really am.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: It’s not simply a program they rolled out and handed to you.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, no.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: We’re rolling it out, yes. Oh, okay. All right. And you’re the one that’s kind of heading the charge here. I am. And how are you feeling the feedback from clients? What are you feeling from the providers as you’re approaching them on this? Is this something common here in Las Vegas?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: No, it’s not common. There’s probably one other agency that’s doing the concierge. It’s not common. But what is common is more and more concierge physicians are rising up. More people want to pay out of their pocket for good quality physicians that can come to the home. So we see a big trend, especially with the affluent. They want it all in the home. They want people to come to them to do the work, and they don’t want to go to a doctor’s office. They don’t want to go. So we’re seeing this trend, and this is a great place to roll this program out.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, and how’s the reception been then? They’ve been very excited?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes. Yes, and we’re training our nurses. We, you know, they all wear black scrubs. They all look professional. So it’s a training thing.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Is there an apprehension among the providers as you guys are going out and exploring this?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Well, the only apprehension is they know us as pediatrics and handling adults. So this is something new. They do know during COVID, we were the nurses that worked 24-7 at Cashman Center. We got the contract. So we got some great exposure during that time. And then we traversed into doing concierge care. So far, it’s being very well received.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So COVID kind of threw you guys into it, and then you realized, hold on, we can do this, right? It’s true. So you grew from it.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: We really did. That’s fantastic.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: It’s very interesting to pulling out and extracting those positives. And you know, now that this is being offered, one of the things that I always tell, because people will bring up, well, you know, 48th in the country and 48th in the country and 48th in the country. I was like, well, At least it’s easier to go from 48th to 30th, to 25th. We can move on the way up, yeah. Going from 5th to 3rd has got to be kind of a tough spot to be able to nestle in, but I think we have an opportunity. We do. Being able to move the needle on what we are as a healthcare community and what we can do for our community working together.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: And thanks to HEALS, Diego, because we have those task force for the workforce solutions and for the physicians and for jobs, and we are working together. We have such a great group of people that want to make a difference here.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I do appreciate the shout out. I try not to shameless plug nonstop because people are like, yes, we get it, right?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: But it’s a lot of people don’t understand how much you do and do to put this program together so we can do coordination of care.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Well, and for a feeling of community. And I think that sometimes people very much underestimate the importance, right? And I’ve heard it a couple of times. People say, well, you know, heels mixers are just people getting together for a couple of drinks after work. And I was like, you know, for me, it’s frustrating because, as you know, I don’t really drink.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: I don’t drink either.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: If you ever offer me a drink, I’m like, yeah, that’s not why I’m going. But the feeling of community, of the identity, not just of Diego’s trying to fix healthcare and so is every single person independently, but being able to come together to find solutions, running into new people, sometimes old friends you don’t really see on a continuous basis. But that’s a very important part, again, going back to what I was mentioning on coordination. how important it is to coordinate. Could you imagine not knowing any of your nurses? Not knowing any of your OTs or PTs or these relationships?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: No. And, you know, if you don’t have the relationship, they’re not going to call you. They’re not going to trust you. Yeah. So building relationships is key in this business. Yeah.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Or any business. And I think it’s, especially in healthcare, it’s very give and take. Because I used to see It’s sometimes you have to take it. When I would have service failures, and I’d have a case manager call me upset, and she’d be like, well, why did this happen with this and this patient? I’d say, you know what? Are you available? Yes, I’m available right now. Let me drive right now. I’m going to go right to where you are. I want you to tell me what went wrong. And they’d always get surprised. And I was like, well, listen, nobody’s going to ever be able to promise you a perfect execution of services. You know, there’s going to be service failures. There’s going to be problems. What I’ve boiled it down to is how do we respond to those challenges and to those problems? Did we make a mistake? Let’s own up to it and see how we can fix those things. So it offers a very unique opportunity to be able to do that. How do you guys function or divide between the concierge service and the other traditional lines of service? Did you guys completely break it up? Is it two separate offices?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: No, no. Same office, just different lines of business. We have different supervisors working on certain, you know, what we call the Medicaid or the insurance population versus the concierge. So we have different people that have identified that want to be in the concierge program. Okay. But with any employee, we vet everybody. We do fingerprinting. We do urine tests. We do drug testing. We really make sure they are trustworthy. We do in-services. We have a little skills lab that we put them through to make sure they know what they’re doing.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So you’re continuously really making sure that your employees that you’re sending out, yeah, you really can’t play around.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: No, you can’t. And we shadow people and we have a new grad program which we developed. Because of COVID, as you know, people have stopped working. I don’t know what they’re all doing to make money, but a lot of nurses have left the industry. And now we are accepting new grads. We’ve come up with a new grad program, which includes shadowing and training. And we were so excited about this because new grads are looking for work and we certainly need more nurses every day.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: You know, I love hearing that because the amount of times that you, as you know, I have the nursing group, the amount of times that they post saying, where can I go as a new grad? And just the limiting factor where we’re desperate for a workforce, yet we make it very difficult for them to get in. And so it doesn’t seem to make sense, right? We all understand that there’s going to be challenges with bringing on new people, but hey, there’s the benefit of being able to mold them the way that, you know, hey, this is the way that we work and this is best practices.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: And we don’t have to accept their bad behaviors. We can mold them into good behaviors. I wasn’t going to go there because I don’t have a nursing license. It is an expense and it is a lot of work, but we are willing to do that.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yes. Yeah. In the end, what do you come out with?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: We come out with a nurse that is reliable, is loyal, and is trained the way we want her to be trained.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: You took a chance on that nurse, and you never know. Some nurses might go off and be able to get another position. It’s a contribution to the community at the very end, right?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Because not everyone is willing to take these risks and not everyone is willing to take the weight on to be able to do this. So let me follow up on this. So your lines of service, right, are the concierge care. What else do you guys offer? You mentioned pediatrics.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, yes. Our largest line is pediatrics. So we take all the Medicaid insurances, and some kids have 112 hours a week of service. There are ventilators, trachs, and G-tubes. We have a lot of visits, like wound care and IV therapy. So we’re not home health, which is just visits. We are considered home care. Okay. Even though we are a certified home health care agency. Oh. So we’re certified home health care because we chose to abide by the higher standards. Right. But we predominantly do different insurances and then now the private pay piece. Okay. We always have an RN on call every day. Somebody answers the phone 24-7. If you called at two o’clock in the morning, our gal, Patty, is going to answer. And it’s pretty good. And we We excel on figuring out those crazy puzzles, because I love doing that. That’s you, right? That’s me.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: That’s the corporate culture. And how’s the feeling around the office when you guys are working throughout the day? It sounds like everyone likes solving the problems then.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Everyone loves solving the problems. If we had more nurses, of course, we all say the same thing. More nurses would make everyone’s life here easier.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: But even there, it sounds like you’re solving problems as well. Hey, we’ve got to figure out a way to be able to get more nurses.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes, so we’re taking in new grads, which is a big thing for us.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: OK, that’s fantastic. And everyone knows, you know, it’s very interesting. Sometimes I’ll hear the complaint, well, you know, these nurses want to get paid all this. Well, yes, you as a business are not trying to overpay for employees, right? Why would the employees on the other side not come back and say, well, you know, I’m trying to get paid the best I can for the work that I do. That’s just how it works in a supply and demand economy. And it’s very interesting when people don’t want to help with the supply and then complain about the demand driving up the costs.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: And you know, a home care nurse has to be courageous, has to be very independent, and needs to be brave. Because if a trach comes out, you have three seconds to figure it out in the home care. situation. If a trait comes out in the hospital, you could just push that code blue button. You can figure it out. In the home, it is you and you alone. So you must be more stronger, courageous. It is no longer the little old lady with the walker. Home care has to do with IVs, wound care, social, what’s going on with the rest of the family, the dynamics, the siblings, other people in the home. There’s so many things a home care nurse needs to encompass. and embrace in order to get along with that family and to provide the service.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So for a new grad nurse, how long do you feel like until they kind of find their rhythm within home care?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, we have a specific program where they’re shadowing, doing the education, they’re working alongside with an RN, and then they really have to pass the check-off system before we let them go to the next step. Okay.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And how long does that take normally do you guys?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: A couple months. Okay. Yes. Some nurses, you know, it’s a scary thing to go in the home and be there by yourself. Yeah. I mean, the comfort of the hospital, right? You have all the supplies.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: All the machines.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yeah.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: If something goes wrong, there’s a lot of backup. Whereas here, I really need to be efficient.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Correct. And that’s why we have an RN and call all night long because at two o’clock in the morning, we want to make sure that nurse knows that she can call us to get advice.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: That there’s going to be some backup for her even.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yeah. Do I need to send him to the ER? What do I do? We always have an RN ready to help our nurses.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: That’s fantastic. And how long has Nurse Corps been in business here in the Valley?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, we’ve been here for 15 years. Okay. It’s been quite a while. And we have 25 branches throughout the country.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Okay. Is it a franchise or is it an independently owned
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Independently owned and they’re based in Texas. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, it’s not a franchise.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And was that the first place you worked at when you got to Las Vegas?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: This was the first place. They recruited me from Hawaii to move to Las Vegas.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Okay, so they’re the ones we can thank for bringing you out here. Yes. Right, not blame, because you’re doing a great job.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Not blame, no. Not blame.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: No, I love it. Fantastic. And where do you see this going in the future? Now that you’re seeing more reception from people, when it comes to home care. Where do you see that headed in the future? What things are you looking out at on the horizon and how to expand or what the next steps are?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, I think we’ll be doing more transports. There are a lot of people here who have their private jets and they come in town and then they need service or they want to fly to another Utah or something, but they need nursing care. on the plane, so I could see transporting becoming more of a big thing here. And then, of course, all the hotels. There are people that fly in that will need some IV therapy or wound care, or they’re a quadriplegic and they want to be here for a week. So we’ll be expanding out as our program grows to those specific things when people come in from other states.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, you have to figure out how to accommodate people as the needs shift. Yes. So you really allow the needs to be able to dictate which way you guys grow. That’s true. And what do you think is a favorite part of what you do, aside from the problem solving? I mean, working in this concierge side, it must be a little bit different than pediatric care and what you were doing before. What draws you to the concierge side that you really enjoy?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Like I said, I like putting the puzzles together. I just met a mobile dentist who can join our team to go. I can recommend them. I love meeting the people. When you meet people that are doing concierge, they’re usually somebody in the business that you go, oh my gosh, you know? And of course, we don’t have real names. We just admitted Jackson Brown, and we just admitted a, you know, Yeah, John Smith. John Smith, and it could be their their street name, so we keep very tight reins on who we take care of. Yeah. And we signed NDAs. We are very careful on who we admit.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, and how you’re servicing, right? They have very specific needs, so having that understanding always helps you to perform better in what you’re doing.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Well, that’s fantastic. Where do you see the future going then immediately? Do you see any incorporation with AI? I’m kind of curious as far as any innovation to see what’s happening technologically. Because, I mean, some of these machines and some of these patients and complexity of patients, when we think of what it was, again, 40 years ago that you can bring a patient home, on event, that’s drastically shifted because of the type of technology that exists and what’s able to happen. What are things around the horizon that you’re excited about or you’re like, hey, this might be around the corner and no one would have thought it possible?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, absolutely. You know, AI can be a very good thing. It can be a very dark thing. So we have to be very discerning. And I see AI is helping with checking the plan of cares, making sure things are complete, doing telehealth medicine is a big, big trend to incorporate.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Thanks to COVID again, right?
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Absolutely. And AI can be very beneficial because it can check things. Did you finish this? Did you complete the goal? It can help you with coming up with treatment plans. It’s a little assistant to make sure that you’re staying on task.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yes. I agree. I remember a while back that as people would document, they were showing it as the… This was a software for hospice. And as the hospice nurse would be documenting, the machine would automatically prompt them, well, have you thought of this medication, right? So it looked for certain triggers, and then would offer recommendations, at which point the nurse could either choose yes, no, but at least those pop-ups were there to make sure, because it’s very easy to expect people to behave like machines and operate perfectly at all times. However, not even machines do that, right? And so being able to have someone that can, you know, after your 14th visit in one day, make sure you’re still executing as exactly and precisely as you should be, as the first visit. It’s very, very interesting to see how those assistants are coming along and how that’s all happening.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Right. And you know, I’m working on getting my functional medicine nursing certification. I’m a big proponent of alternative medicine and combining Western with Eastern. And integrating, and I truly believe that if we do integrative medicine with our patients, we can make some recommendations for the nutritionist and for that person, for the chef who can prepare a healthier meal. And I think our patients will benefit from that. And I’ll never just say all Western medicine or all alternative, because I think you have to have a good combination of the two. And integrative medicine, functional medicine is becoming the new trend to integrate medicine with alternative ways.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I’m hearing a lot of that. You know, it’s very interesting. I was having this conversation recently as we were camping in the desert, and we were talking about these funny supplements that sometimes people take, and sometimes it gets a little wild. Oh, wild, yes. And while I was, I think we were actually talking about coffee enemas, and I was like, yeah, I cannot believe people would try this. Thousands of years of evolution, your body kind of knows what it needs, right? As long as you’re eating a rounded out diet, for the most part, your body’s going to get most of what it needs. It’s not like nature forgot one very simple part or one very essential part. And I think that we kind of moved away. Again, you look at traditional medicine, things that got us to where we were. And so we kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater. There may has been wisdom there because immediately we go into the scientific method and, you know, looking for proof on everything and then circling back and finding out, well, hold on a second. this might actually be, there may be something here. And my thing is, if an animal, or if they’re drawn to something, typically it’s for a reason. As animals evolve, they figure out these little advantages that they can get through nature, and I’m seeing that happen more and more with the alternative medicines and different approaches.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yep. And that’s a whole other podcast, you know. Yeah, right.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Because I could talk about that for years. You know, it’s just funny because I remember growing up and then someone telling me that, oh, yeah, I remember, I don’t know if it was in the 70s or 80s, they used to tell women, oh, yeah, no, you need to buy formula because formula is better than breast milk.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yeah.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I was just thinking in my head, hold on. I know. Somebody in a lab came up with something better than what brought us here after thousands of years.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: I know. In the 60s, we were not breastfed. It was not cool. I was a bottle-fed baby. And of course, I breastfed my kids. So things come circling around. And we are products of our environment. Our environment is not as healthy as it was with our grandparents. It’s a different world. It’s a different world, so we really need to look at both sides.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, and even the things that we do, you know, I was looking at, yeah, I don’t know if you know, I cut out sugar back in like 2008. And people would ask me, why did you stop adding sugar? I just completely, I went completely dry on sugar. I would not eat desserts, would not. And all it took, I probably did that for about six, seven years. Now I’ll dabble a little bit because of the gym. I need the carbohydrates. But even then, I try to get them from fruit. And it was all due one time I was listening to when YouTube first came out. And I was like, oh, wow, they have different professors giving presentations. And all I did was watch an endocrinologist that wasn’t making any claims aside from, this is how much sugar we used to eat, and this is how much sugar we’re eating. And so just off of that, there was one sentence in there And he was sharing, he goes, you know, our great-great-grandparents used to eat about 12 grams of sugar, and that came from fruit. That’s on an average day. And I remember thinking back when I was a kid, and there was like 55 grams of sugar just in one can of Pepsi.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Or a bowl of cereal.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah. And then things that we have traditionally thought, oh, this is fantastic. This is good. This is what I should be doing.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: And it really has no basis in reality.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I mean, sugar is more addicting than cocaine. I always tell people that. My kids, it’s very funny because they’ll try, oh, no, no. But they like it. Well, of course they like it. Of course. It’s a jam pack full of sugar. Yeah. And it’s not, I never thought I’d be that parent. I’m going to be honest with you. But I watch it very much and I think, well, just why do you need that much sugar? What is the point? Of course, you’re going to like it. Of course, they’re going to smile and say thank you and ask you for more. But we really need to have a little consideration of what we’re putting in and why we’re putting it.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: I mean, look at the pictures from the 70s, the 60s, and the 50s. Nobody was obese. Yeah. And now we have an obesity problem.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: You know, he made that connection as well, along with corn syrup.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yeah. Terrible.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And he actually used the case study of Japan, because Japan didn’t grow any sugar. And so he started looking at the obesity rates in Japan when it started, once we started trading corn syrup over to Japan, the change that happened in their population. And so like we were mentioning, right, I think there’s a lot of changes in the world around us. And sometimes we end up circling back, you know, what at one point was home care and then eventually went to hospitals and these, you know, these institutions where people would go when they were sick. And all of a sudden we’re circling back to home care and people wanting to be home and being taken care of at home. It’s very interesting to see very thoughtful people developing strategies within our community. And I’ve always admired that about you because it wasn’t, for me, Nurse Corps was Terri. Anytime I ever thought of Nurse Corps, and I remember the little red logo, I always thought Terri was on my brain. Oh yeah, Terri works there, right? And it was very interesting as I was talking to you, finding out all the other things you do. You had shared a little on this concierge care program that you have. at one of the Heels event, and I got very excited because I think we’re pushing new frontiers. We are. And I like watching innovation. I like watching these boundaries be pushed and thinking of different ways to be able to care for people aside from, well, this is what we’ve always done. Yes. Right. And so, yeah, I’m very curious to see what you come up with next time.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Good.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yes. Now that you’ve been here. And I appreciate your kind words at Heels. Again, I’ve worked very hard to bring the community.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Oh, I love it. I love it.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And I’m glad that you guys have remained members and been faithful. I know I had a challenging time jumping in during COVID, but Nurse Corps has always supported Las Vegas Heals, and we’re very appreciative, not just because of what Heals is and because I’m doing it, but because of the vision we’re trying to accomplish. I truly believe that a community here will help provide better health care to the residents of Las Vegas. True. And Lord knows there’s a huge shortage. There’s a lot of work to do.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: Yes, there is.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Well, thank you very much for coming on to the show today, Terri. Is there any last words you’d like to leave for people? How can they get more information? Contact me.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: You can call our office number 702-458-1137. My cell phone is 702-861-8604. And I’m Terri B. Or you can look us up at nursecorps.com. And it’s N-U-R-S-E-C-O-R-E.com. Thank you so much. This was so much fun.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Absolutely. It was a pleasure having you in. Again, every time I interview someone, even though we already knew each other, you get to know people in a very different light. It’s very enjoyable. So thank you very much for coming on the show. Ladies and gentlemen, as she had mentioned, you can go on Norsecore.com. That’s N-U-R-S-E-C-O-R-E dot com. Or you can always call in to the office at 702-458-1137 with any questions you may have. And from the sound of it, Terri, it sounds like even if they have challenges that they have not been able to find answers, you guys may help them with that as well. We’re going to figure it out. Excellent. I love that attitude. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for another episode of The Heals Pod, tuning in and learning about the services that are in our community.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: All right. Aloha.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Thank you. Have a great day.
TERRI BRUESEHOFF: You too.
