From "...a musical gig" to a cause! Anthony Cirillo Shares His Passion for Caregivers

Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver here on Sirius XM 131. If you want to be a part of the show, 877-655-6755. And that was my wife Gracie singing from her new CD, Resilient.

And she does a great job. If you want to have that CD, we'll send it to you free. It's our gift to you. We're asking for folks that will just contribute any amount, it doesn't matter, whatever, to Standing With Hope to help us with the trip coming up this summer with the shipping of prosthetic supplies, with all the work we do with amputees. You can sponsor this show, whatever.

Whatever's on your heart to do, do it. And then Gracie and I will send you that CD. Go out to hopeforthecaregiver.com. It's right there on the front page where it says giving, right there.

Just click on that and we'll be glad to do that. All right, John, I have been involved in a couple of different interviews and summit, caregiver summits online with a friend of mine, Anthony Cirillo. And he is on the phone right now. And he is the practice partner of GIS healthcare. And they are provider of caregiver related solutions to corporations and health providers. He's also the creator of the caregiver smile summit, the caregiver smile summit of which that's the thing I participate with. And he is a health and aging expert, professional speaker, a media influencer. He is the fellow of American College of Healthcare Executives with a master's from the University of Pennsylvania.

He's also a regular contributor to US News and World Report every month. And more importantly to you and me, John, well, he's a caregiver, but he's also a guitar player. So we got a keyboard player. We got two keyboard players here. And now we've got a guitar player. We're trying to get the band together here.

Anthony, welcome to the show. Well, if you're a bass player, you can stay home. Can you play bass at all, Anthony?

Oh, well, well, there you go. I mean, guys, I started out so I was the guitar player, you know, guitar player. But, you know, the first band I joined at 12. You know, everybody was vying for guitar because, you know, the guitar players got all the girls, right? So I learned how to play the bass. So there you go.

Yeah. So, you know, whatever you think of bass players, start taking it back. So, yeah, most of my career, I was the bass player in the band until the band's got fed up with me. And then I went out as a solo and picked up the guitar again. That's actually when I started singing for our seniors. I'm way too much fun, by the way.

We do. But in the R&B world, I am the accordion player. Well, listen, tell us what, first off, tell us a little bit about your background, your journey as a caregiver, and then we're going to get into some of the things that you're helping shape across the country here.

Sure. So my background has always been pretty much health care. I actually started out in broadcasting, believe it or not, in Philadelphia, but I didn't want to go to Bemidji, Minnesota, no offense to those folks. But to practice my craft.

There you go. Because I was, as you mentioned, I was also a full time musician at night, which is pertinent to my whole story and career and why I do what I do. So I wound up getting jobs in medical publishing. And then somebody recognized that I might have skills to be a director of corporate communications at a hospital. So I was 12 years in hospitals in Philadelphia. And then a funny thing happened. I was, you know, singing in the band seriously at night and then, you know, got out and said, you know, God gave me this talent to sing, what am I going to do with it? And one of the guys who worked for me in the hospital was also a professional juggler on the side.

And he said, you know, there's all these thousands of places that are just dying for entertainment. So I went into a CCRC, you know, those continuing care retirement communities, I guess they call them something else these days. But and that was my first gig. And when I left Philadelphia, I went I was doing 100 gigs part time in all these places. And it changed my whole trajectory because I realized I was I was getting a heck of a lot of fulfillment out of it.

I was also giving a lot. And that kind of led to a job in New York where we were working with seniors in the boroughs of in the boroughs around different kind of health care plans and things like that. And I joke with people that job sort of coalesced my career as a, you know, marketing guy in health care. And as a musician, because when as the marketing guy would staged an event in the boroughs and as the I would show up and I'd become the emcee, the DJ and the singer.

And if your name is Cirilla, when you sing Sinatra and you're in New York, well, you know, you know, the rest of that story shot spread in the news. Exactly. I think you're on the right show there.

Yeah, you are. Anthony, tell me this. You've been watching a lot of the policy things going on in the health care world in our country and the things coming out of Washington and that are happening around the states around the country. You've got your finger on the pulse of this. You're really addressing some of these issues. What's the burr under your saddle today about and how does this affect the family caregiver?

Yeah, absolutely. And I was a caregiver for my mom. And just so the audience knows a bit of the background, you know, she she was living with my sister and my sister became one of those statistics and predeceased her.

And we moved on to North Carolina and I was her caregiver for for a couple of years. And I think that's when I really got intently involved in all this. But, you know, some of the things that I'm seeing, I mean, there's some great movement out there with some of the national things, the raise, you know, Caregiver Act and those folks who are starting to get together to, you know, point people in the right direction and, you know, giving them the hope that you talk about all the time. But the thing where I'm concentrating most of my work now is and it's because of my health care background and the gaps that I see is, you know, kind of, you know, caregiving in the workforce and then, you know, health care, the health care profession where, you know, pretty much have grown up and and kind of their relationship to caregivers.

And what what prompted me to reach out to you, as you said, what you know, what was bugging me. And there was a study that came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association this past week. So it's fresh, right. And it's scientific. And, you know, it kind of confirmed what anecdotally we kind of know. And it basically said that, you know, when you're encountering the health care profession, they're really good at helping you understand, you know, the treatment for a mom or dad or whoever it might be, and all the things that are going on with the patient.

But they're horrible. I mean, or non-existent when it comes to asking the caregiver kind of, you know, how are you doing, you know, and what can we do for you? In fact, you know, more than half of these folks don't ask. And so it really brought home to me the gaps in health care because, you know, essentially JAMA concluded it raises important questions about the role of health care workers in supporting the need of family, family caregivers. And so, you know, what I'm trying to do in health care is to end in, you know, with caregiving in the workforce is to elevate the notion of caregiving. And, you know, there's a lot of jargon in health care. And one of the ones they're throwing around right now, they call them social determinants of health.

And it's the 80% of things that, you know, don't happen in a physician office or in a hospital. It's, you know, transportation or food insecurity. You know, all these different things can affect, you know, a person's health and wellbeing. You know, we tell employers, you know, if you give a gym membership, but your employee doesn't have transportation, that's a social determinant of health, right?

They can't get to the gym. So I'm trying to move and elevate what caregiving is in the whole scheme of things, right? That it's, that it is another social determinant of health when there was a caregiving situation, you know, involved that this, this bears looking at, it bears, you know, looking at a solution in a different way and getting to that gap that, you know, was raised in this JAMA study. So, you know, this kind of falls under a, you know, kind of a bigger issue of what they call population health management.

And that essentially, if you really just want to skinny it down, it just says, we're all in this together, the community, the patients, the caregivers, the associations, the organizations. And, you know, some employers are starting, starting to get it. We had a wonderful conversation last week with a major insurer.

And, you know, I had a whole bunch of slides, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to talk about all my great expertise here about, you know, social determinants and, and population health. And, you know, employers need to start looking at that is the issue, not the issue of, oh, we're good, we're going to provide a caregiver benefit of some sort of let's check the box type of thing. And the person from this company basically said, you know, we understand that the overall health of our employee is the most important thing. And before, and of our customers, because it was really more of a customer conversation. And they said, before we can ever get them to consider our XYZ policy or whatever other product we have, we have to make sure that they as a caregiver are healthy and less stressed so they can make better decisions. And, and then we could lead them in a conversation about, you know, the things that we have. And I said, wow, you guys just, you just read my first five slides.

I said, so I'm just going to skip, skip ahead to this whole thing. So that's kind of where I'm looking right now to kind of concentrate the, I'm trying to first elevate the conversation about what is caregiving when you talk to health professionals and you start spelling it as a social determinative health, one of the big buzzwords out there in hospital and physician practices right now, they start looking at it different. And so, yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, that, that JAMA article, you know, I sent it to, you know, I don't know how many hundreds of people and it's opened a lot of conversations now about, you know, how do you, how do you do that? And, you know, we're specific, we have some specific ways that we're doing it, you know, with, with the company that I'm working for that I'm very passionate about, but that's kind of the bigger issue that I'm seeing, you know, caregiving in the workplace is reaching a tipping point.

And, you know, until you, you know, get, you know, it happening to the CEO, you know, don't always get the trickle down. I mean, AARP and, and reorganization called React, which I'm sure you know about or respect the caregiver's time, you know, listed a bunch of benchmark companies that are doing this, but they're, you know, there's not many out there. I'll tell you a quick story from the summit that Peter, you participated in. There was a gentleman named Don Weber from logistics health, and he was on the PBS program.

That's where I saw him at first and reached out to him. And he is so enlightened and it's because of his own caregiving situation with his employees about the kind of health benefits that they provide to them. They give them wellness time every week to just go do whatever they need to do. He had an employee, an employee whose mother had cancer at a very young age. And she was obviously the daughter was in her thirties or something.

They held her job, worked out a financial arrangement with her, protected her, looked after her, you know, they're, those companies are few and far between. So, you know, part of it, you know, part of this, the problem is that we don't often, I'm sure this comes up and you know, my wife and I, we had five family deaths in four years. I mean, you know, from 13 to 18, we were just in turmoil and, uh, we never really, and some of those were caregiving situations, but we never necessarily considered ourselves caregivers.

Right. As so many of your listeners, you know, can relate to, we just were doing what we had to do. And so if caregivers don't self identify in the workplace and it's a double edged sword, because sometimes when they do, that could be a career ending thing.

Um, these are the issues that keep me up at night. Well, yeah, Anthony and I, I think that one of the things that employers would benefit greatly from understanding is the, the makeup of the family caregiver. We are high functioning multitaskers who have a over, um, a hyper sense of responsibility because we're showing up to deal with stuff that we're not necessarily trained for.

We're showing a great amount of flexibility. I wrote an article about this in market watch, um, about the entrepreneurial heart of caregivers and how that translates into business skills because we do things that are extraordinary with, with conflict resolution. What's that worth to an employer with, with, you know, learning to be, uh, to adapt and to be flexible, to deal with a situation we're not necessarily trained for, but we, we embrace it. We go after it.

I mean, they didn't train me to do a fraction of the stuff I do as a musician and employers that don't hang onto these people are losing valuable, valuable employees. And so it's in their best interest to, to do this, uh, to, to be able to go in and grab them and keep them and, and, and develop ways to help help them along the journey. It seems to me a no brainer, but I know you, you fought this battle. We're talking with Anthony Cirillo where he is the founder of the caregiver summit caregiver summit.org and just like it sounds caregiver summit.org. He's going to don't go away. I think we're going to talk a little bit more on the other side of the break.

If you want to be a part of the show, 877-655-6755. Have you had trouble in your workplace as a caregiver? Is that's been a struggle for you?

This is the place for it. There's some things that you can, uh, to do about this. You can, you can learn to work through this.

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www.caregiverlegal.com, an independent associate. Have you ever struggled to trust God when lousy things happen to you? I'm Gracie Rosenberger and in 1983 I experienced a horrific car accident leading to 80 surgeries and both legs amputated.

I questioned why God allowed something so brutal to happen to me, but over time my questions changed and I discovered courage to trust God. That understanding, along with an appreciation for quality prosthetic limbs, led me to establish Standing With Hope. For more than a dozen years, we've been working with the government of Ghana and West Africa, equipping and training local workers to build and maintain quality prosthetic limbs for their own people. On a regular basis, we purchase and ship equipment and supplies.

And with the help of inmates in a Tennessee prison, we also recycle parts from donated limbs. All of this is to point others to Christ, the source of my hope and strength. Please visit standingwithhope.com to learn more and participate in lifting others up. That's standingwithhope.com. I'm Gracie and I am standing with hope. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver here on the Family Talk Channel, Series XM 131. This is Peter Rosenberger. That is my wife Gracie with Russ Taft on her new CD, Resilient.

And she is indeed resilient. You can get a copy of that if you want. Go to hopeforthecaregiver.com. Donate to Standing With Hope with the presenting sponsor of this show to help with the prosthetic limb work or even sponsor the show. Gracie now sent you one of these. We'd love for you to have it at hopeforthecaregiver.com. By the way, you can also subscribe to our free podcast and I think you'll like it. We put out the show. We put out little clips of the show. We may even put out some bonus stuff for you. Maybe even something about John Butler. Who knows?

We're just crazy. Anthony, I got just one minute left. I want to just in a nutshell combine what you're doing and how it can help the family caregiver and where they need to go. We're talking to Anthony Cirillo. He is the founder of the Caregiver Summit. He and I have had a chance to work together many times and he is really involved on policy stuff on advocating for you and me as a fellow caregiver and all the healthcare systems that are out there.

He's doing a great work. Anthony, where can people go to find out more about you and what can they expect there? You already mentioned caregiversummit.org. We also have our company website, GISHC.com. If somebody wants to email me, it's my name, Anthony Cirillo with a J-R because I'm a junior.

It's A-N-T-H-O-N-Y-C-I-R-I-L-L-O-J-R at Gmail. Essentially what we're doing with the company that I'm working with and passionate about what we do is because all those videos that are part of that Caregiver Summit are also part of our solution. We have a caregiver solution that we bring out to companies that involves advocates as well as information for all life stages and ages. It's not just about caring for older loved ones.

It could be an autistic child, a foster situation, whatever it might be. We have a combination of services and high tech, high touch that we believe and it's all original content that we believe can change kind of how we're looking at this. The thing that I'm doing that I think is the most important is that we're starting to talk to healthcare systems about this. We actually have a little card that we can equip physician offices with so that when they're on the ground, right face to face with a caregiver, you can basically say, hey, I've got something for you.

Give them this card and entitle them to all the services. We're working to get health systems involved in this, realizing at the end of the day, this impacts total overall health. Some of that works back to when I was a caregiver and my physician had me in for my physical and I keep myself in pretty good shape. Then he wanted to see me three months later and I said, well, why? He was also caring for my mom. That's how I found him and he was so caring that I switched doctors and went to him.

My mom had every bit of her cognition until the end at 94. I could do a whole show with you on stories of mom, but he wanted me there because of my stress level. It's physicians like him who tell me that if we had a solution that we could just give to people, because they don't have the time, they probably look at this CHAMA study and say, we want to do all these things. We don't have the time. There's a collective shrug and I get that, but you know what? There's a finite amount of seconds in the day and you have to put the right tool to the right job.

They're involved in so many other things that it's completely understandable. Anthony, you're the right person to do what you're doing right now and you're doing a great work on it and I appreciate you taking the time to call the show. I want you to keep calling back in. We're going to address these subjects periodically, so don't be a stranger, all right?

I will not. Thank you, guys. Anthony Cirillo, appreciate it very much. GISHC.com. I'll put this out on our podcast as well and then it's on our Facebook at HopeForTheCaregiver.com on our Facebook page.

GISHC.com. Hey, listen, Valentine's Day is coming up this week. Here's a little something. I want to throw this out to you.

If you are a caregiving spouse, let go of the expectations and just deal with the day as it is. Valentine's Day tends to be a little bit more of a fabricated holiday. It's not scripturally sanctioned. Let me just say that. I think it's driven mostly by a hallmark, but that's just me.

Call me silly. My favorite holiday is Arbor Day. You plant a tree, you give some water, you say a prayer, you walk away, nobody gets hurt, there's no parade. All right? Valentine's Day is coming up and it comes with it a lot of drama for the family caregiver, particularly if you're a spouse and maybe your loved one is in, your wife or your husband is in the hospital or has dementia or doesn't even know your name anymore.

These are painful things. I get it. So lower the expectations of what this has got to be and just appreciate the beauty for what it is. If they can't get you a card, go get yourself a card. Send the kind of card that honors the love that you two share. Even if your husband or your wife can't do that with you, send it to yourself anyway.

All right? Do something that's going to feed your soul. That was our caregiver tip of the day. Feed your soul. If your loved one is gone, fix your favorite meal and celebrate and then invite somebody over to share it with you.

Okay? This was your husband's favorite meal. This was your wife's favorite meal or whatever.

Just do something that honors that love. All right? I saw a picture on the internet recently that it was an elderly gentleman in a booth in a restaurant.

I saw that. He was having coffee with a picture of his deceased wife. Whatever feeds your soul. If your spouse is a caregiver for parents, and a lot of times this is happening with husbands whose wives are taking care of their aging parents, be kind to them for Valentine's Day. Don't make it about expectations that she's somehow got to make this special for you on every level.

Okay? If things don't go the way you want it to, just make it comfortable and special for her. It may be just that you have a nice dinner for her when she gets home from the nursing home or from hospice or whatever. Have the bed, fresh sheets in the bed. Put out her favorite pajamas. Not a costume you want her to wear. Just the favorite pajamas. Don't put on the Marvin Gaye music. Just care for her.

Fold and clean the laundry. Well, romance starts sometimes in the laundry room or in the kitchen. It may not be everything you want it to be, but just be kind. Okay? The love you have transcends one day. Don't try to cram all that love into one day. Okay?

Let it just breathe. This is Hope for the Caregiver. Hopeforthecaregiver.com. Love doing the show. I love having you here. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers. We'll see you next week. Today's a great day to start being healthy, by the way. Okay? We'll see you next week.