A Resource on Home Care, Hospice for Your Press and Communications Teams

By HCA Communications Director Roger Noyes

HCA stands ready to help you tell the story of home care and hospice in your district.

As HCA’s Communications Director, I am available to provide you with data points, program or coverage information, announcements about benefit availability, or other helpful source material for your constituent newsletters, press outreach, correspondence and other communications.

I formerly served as a press officer and communications manager in the Senate, so I’ve not only handled all of these matters, but I truly understand their importance.

This past legislative session I had the privilege of working with your offices to advance messaging about home care and hospice public policy in the news.

Our team at HCA stood with Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried to call for a minimum threshold of existing infrastructure funds that must be specifically earmarked for community-based care. Our coalition’s press outreach netted coverage in the Albany Times Union, Politico and Crain’s New York Business.

The 2019 legislative session was no doubt a landmark year for banner legislative advances. Home care and hospice was no different. Seizing on this theme, we worked with Senate Health Committee Chairman Gustavo Rivera and Assemblymember John McDonald to highlight a home care national-first in what was otherwise a year of many legislative milestones: their bill to create the nation’s first home care-directed structure of support for sepsis prevention and intervention.

Our press outreach with Senator Rivera and Assemblymember McDonald was featured on WRGB News Channel 6 at a time when the deadly and life-altering effects of sepsis have become locally prominent in the Capital Region through the story of Joshua Woodward, an Albany firefighter who made a heroic recovery from the condition.

Further raising the bill’s profile, HCA also connected with the Utica Observer-Dispatch for a report on Monday, June 24, with the headline “Local nurse helped launch sepsis program adopted statewide.” It tells of the work HCA Board Member Amy Bowerman, RN BSN, did to develop the HCA screening tool, serving as the home care clinical leader on HCA’s Stop Sepsis at Home project. (She is Executive Director at MVHS-Senior Network Health in the Utica region.)

HCA has a lot of work ahead of us to assure this bill gets signed into law, and I surely hope we can count on the Legislature to continue backing up this vital measure that will support home care’s use of a tool to screen patients at home for sepsis. (See our related story about this initiative receiving a 2019 Sepsis Heroes Award). Media attention will be critical to this effort.

Please be sure to share my contact information with your press and communications teams. No matter what the specific issue in home care or hospice, please also share my invitation for your staff to reach me for any information requests that can support your outreach to constituents, the media and the public.

I can be reached at rnoyes@hcanys.org or (518) 810-0665.

Please also feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or follow HCA’s Twitter and Facebook pages.