We're continuing our special series of reports on caregiving with a story about the home care business.

When Detroit's Bill Kubota reports on how one home care agency in Clinton Township was started by three firefighters who saw the challenges of taking care of aging parents at home.

He also takes a look at the burgeoning business of home health care.

The Brain Injury Association of Michigan's annual conference in Lansing.

Here you'll find companies that provide caregivers an anchor roster.

Now is about 100.

It has about 120, people on the payroll.

Inspire home Care, offering nurses, therapists, caregivers, helping people with brain injuries and the elderly in business 16 years, 2008.

We had a bad economy crash, and I was in advertising at the time.

Lorien was in home care, but I was laid off during and was out of a job and nobody was hiring.

Really.

Lorene and John Beebe went all in with their home care business.

The growth industry with Michigan's aging population.

They joined the Kara Condamine, now in the trillions of dollars nationwide.

With so many elderly in the disabled, many from auto accidents, it brings caregivers and providers here networking and improving their skills.

Having resources here and having exhibitors here so people can pick up bits and pieces of information that will help them provide better care, is really what this is about.

Just the catastrophic industry of of auto accident victims alone, with traumatic brain injuries and spinal cord injuries is about $1 billion a year in total.

That's just in what the emkay the catastrophic fund spends.

There's just talking in Michigan and just in Michigan compared to my previous career advertising, I used to think I was doing good in the world by selling, cars.

And this is it's a it's a different level of reward.

You feel like you're at least making a difference in somebody's life.

You know?

Bob Milner got his start in the industry, too, after the 2008 downturn in Macomb County.

He and fellow Harrison Township Fire fighters Mike Barnard and Jason Growth ran a side business remodeling basements.

When that went bust, Jason discovered home care.

It seemed like an up and coming industry.

And a few nights later, after Jason came up with this idea, Mike and I were on the ambulance working for the fire department, and we got a call at like three in the morning for a, elderly female that was disoriented, didn't know where she was confused.

So the daughter came and said, I don't know what to do.

I can't take care of her.

You know, we can't afford to put her into a nursing home.

I want her to stay at home.

I need somebody to come and help take care of her.

And me and Mike looked at each other and we said, well, this is our business.

From there, we never looked back.

First call home health care now serves 50 patients across the state with an in-home staff of as many as 150 caregivers.

How many folks do you have to deal with on a given day?

Yeah.

Sometimes 20, sometimes 30.

Just depends on how the day is going.

All right.

Are we ready?

All right.

Every week we get together at the beginning of the week.

And we go over each case with our nurses, with our care coordinators and our schedulers, and we say, okay, what's happening with this case?

And this is a straight nursing case.

Insulin management.

You have different levels of caregivers.

And then some cases are actual nurse cases where we need to have a nurse in the home for those 12 hour shifts that we do.

The issues medical, logistical.

And then there's the personal chemistry between caregivers and patients.

Well, she went out to the appointment.

She really likes her good.

She did a really good.

I hear what they may not like, what they may like, what they then should improve.

And then I bring them back here.

And then as a team, we discuss that to make it better for the people in the field.

Many first call patients are catastrophic.

Auto accident survivors with caregivers always by their side.

The office staff here out the door onsite from time to time.

Sometimes I am in Sterling Heights.

Sometimes I may have to drive an hour and a half to Northville.

For patients.

Sometimes I may have to go to Grand Rapids and train caregivers.

And so first calls Rhonda Prescott is checking in with caregiver Patricia Burke's and patient Guy Hedrick at an assisted living facility in McComb Township.

Guy had an automobile accident back in 2015, and since then he's had some mobility issues.

When Hedrick takes a step, Burke says they're with him.

No changes.

Right?

The players are.

No, no.

No changes.

I mean, like, you know, they change like a medication.

He's on real good on that.

So our caregiver, Patricia, does, four 12 hour shifts, and then we have 24 hour care.

So we have 12 hour shifts around the clock every day of the week.

He's always got somebody here.

Burks has been a caregiver for 25 years, nearly a decade with first call, industry wide finding and keeping staff can be hard.

So much turnover.

The numbers can be head turning nationwide.

There's a very, very high turnover rate in the 70 percents.

And we've gotten that down to be 50 to 55%, which is amazing for the caregiving industry.

I would like to set up an interview with you if you could give me a call back.

And recruiting more of caregivers seems never ending in the home care business.

Well, the big issue is as compensation, right?

And we're where is the world and all that it has even drastically increased since 2020, since Covid by almost $10 an hour for nursing staff.

We also greatly increased our benefits package in the last five years.

Home care as an industry did not typically offer a lot of benefits for for staff.

That has changed.

There are more patients out there.

First call would like to help people more recently severely injured in auto accidents, who saw medical coverage change because of a revision in Michigan's no fault insurance law.

With that change, companies like First Call say they can't afford to provide that care.

But First Call keeps moving forward, especially after Covid, when the use of the Internet and Zoom and Google Meet has allowed us to recruit and even train staff virtually.

It's gotten a lot easier to service clients all over the state.

When we started out, we were the business owners.

We were the recruiters.

We were the trainers.

We were everything.

We've hired smart people and that we thought that was the best way to do it and then manage that.

And we've grown quite a bit in the last 15 years.