Carey Lucki: A Vision for Aging in the Home

Imagery for Episode 79 of Healthcare Change Makers including a photo of our guest, Carey Lucki from Circle of Care

(Access show transcript) Carey Lucki, CEO of Circle of Care and VP at Sinai Health, shares how her organization is transforming home and community care through innovation and integration.

Summary

Carey Lucki sat down with us to talk about her deep pride and passion for the work Circle of Care does as a predominant organization in Ontario’s home and community care sector.

What sets Circle of Care apart, as you’ll hear in this episode, is its unique combination of traditional home care and upstream social care programs. This includes transportation, meals on wheels, and innovative programs like their Adult Day Program, which contributes to that true wrap-around experience for their clients.

Carey speaks passionately about her vision for the future of home care, one where people can age gracefully in their homes, and where younger generations are encouraged to pursue careers in this space.

Stick around to the end where we have a fun chat in our lightning round. Carey tells us about the fiction novel she’s written, which she describes as the perfect beach read.

Mentioned in this Episode

Transcript 

Imagine you could step inside the minds of Canada's healthcare leaders, glimpse their greatest fears, strongest drivers, and what makes them tick. Welcome to Healthcare Changemakers, a podcast where we talk to leaders about the joys and challenges of driving change and working with partners to create the safest healthcare system.

Michelle Holden: Hello, listeners. Welcome back to another great Healthcare Changemakers podcast episode. I'm Michelle Holden, and for this one, I'm joined by my colleague, Marc Aiello. Hi Marc.

Marc Aiello: Hey, Michelle.

Michelle Holden: Marc, why don't you give the listeners a bit of a preview what they'll be hearing about.

Marc Aiello: Yeah, sure thing. So for this one, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Carey Lucki. She's the CEO of Circle of Care and Vice President at Sinai Health. And Circle of Care is a home and community care provider serving the greater Toronto area. In the episode, Carey pulls the curtain back a bit on Circle of Care's work and a couple of their initiatives that are integrating home and community care. And for our listeners, she details how these programs got their start and how important leadership buy-in was at the time to help move their vision of care forward.

Michelle Holden: Yes. And as an example, one of the initiatives that we'll get into with Carey, is the Circle of Care Adult Day program in Vaughan, Ontario, which has recently received international recognition. So let's jump right into it. Here's our conversation with Carey Lucki.

Hi Carey. Thanks for joining us on Healthcare Changemakers.

Carey Lucki: Hi, it's a pleasure to be here.

Michelle Holden: We're really glad you are. We wanted to hear a little bit about your morning routine before we get into our questions. Before you become Carey, CEO of Circle of Care, do you have like a non-negotiable part of your routine? Something that just can't be sidelined, maybe like your morning coffee?

Carey Lucki: Absolutely. And it's funny, my typical morning is probably very boring, very uneventful, and it's very routine. I do get up around 6 A.M., sometimes between six and seven, and I'm not the person who goes out and does a jog or gets on the treadmill. I actually do exactly what you said, I get my coffee and I treasure that coffee, it's non-negotiable like you said. And I sit in my living room and it's very quiet, because everybody else is still sleeping, including all the animals that live in our household, two cats and a dog. And it's me time, so I take about 45 minutes and I usually read or I research something unwork-related. And that's my time for me. And then after about 45 minutes or so, the day begins, and that's when it begins with emails or calls or meetings, the to-do list, and it goes right through till about 8 P.M. at night, sometimes longer, unfortunately.

Michelle Holden: That's a long one. I was going to ask you, then you kind of alluded to the start of it, what does a typical day look like for you then?

Carey Lucki: It can be starting right away at eight o'clock or 8:30. I could be driving to the office that day, or I could be jumping on a Team's call or Zoom. It really is a mix of all of that. It's calls, it's meetings, sometimes it's presentations. We have various meetings throughout the month at Circle of Care, with our leaders. So we'll have a leadership forum, we have our senior management executive meetings, it could be a town hall that I'm presenting at. So it's just a mishmash, really, of all of the above. Or it could be going to a conference, that could be another part of the day, or it could be going to a board meeting. We are members of Home Care Ontario and the Ontario Community Support Association, so time could be spent at those meetings as well.

Michelle Holden: Your career journey has taken you from a role in occupational therapy all the way to your current role in leadership. So can you share a little bit about these early experiences and maybe how they shaped you?

Carey Lucki: Yes, be happy to. My first job, as an occupational therapist, was at the Hospital for Sick Children back in the day. So for the first 12, 13 years of my career, I was exposed to all the inner workings of an established, world-renowned academic healthcare institution. And really what I mean by that is, in addition to learning about being an OT and furthering my role as a frontline clinician, I was exposed to so much more at the hospital. I was exposed to partnerships with the universities, namely University of Toronto, at times I was an associate professor for some of the courses that took place, so that was a great opportunity. I was exposed to research, research ethnic boards, presenting at conferences. And really, working at the hospital gave me the opportunity to interact with so many other healthcare professionals, so not just my peers, but doctors and surgeons and nurse practitioners and management.

And all of this while I was in my twenties, and I chuckle a little bit, because I really was this incredibly shy and anxious individual who did not have a lot of confidence when I started working there. But by the time I left in 2002, after 13 years, I had just really developed a lot of skills and learnings along the way, so it was a great opportunity while I was an OT.

And then afterwards, I began working in the community and that was a whole different ball game compared to the hospital setting. And it's funny, I came out of the hospital feeling like a true expert, having a lot of knowledge, significant knowledge, and knowing a lot about best practices, particularly in pediatrics. But that's not enough, actually, if you're going to work in the community and be successful in the community, it's a whole different set of skills you have to learn in the community. You have to learn to be flexible and adaptable, you have to have a degree of resilience, because you're often on your own when you're out working in the home and community care sector. You have to be resourceful, a problem solver and very self-disciplined. So lots of interesting skills that I learned along the way in both of those settings.

Michelle Holden: Yeah. Since you moved from hospital into the community and now home care and different avenues, how did you feel when the time came that you were like, I need to move and change and get new experience? What was it that told you that?

Carey Lucki: So it was interesting, with the move from hospital to community, part of that was related to changes in my personal life, because I started a family at that time and I wanted to have a little bit more flexibility. The hospital was very much eight to four, eight to five, sometimes longer, much more structured and rigid. Not that you have time off when you're in the community, but the community initially enabled me to go back to a part-time status, which gave me some of that flexibility.

After I had been working in the community, still as a clinician and then leaning more towards doing some professional practice and teaching of occupational therapy, that's when I started to think about leadership and going into management. It's interesting when you are under management or under a number of different leaders and you observe and you watch how decisions get made. That was when I started to think about maybe sort of throwing my hat in the ring and starting to think about, maybe I should move into a position of management or administration to support some decision-making that goes on across organizations, to provide good care. And that's what led to that transition.

Michelle Holden: Yeah, I like that you were kind of taking notes and thinking about what you saw in different leadership roles and kind of teaching yourself. Do you still teach, by the way?

Carey Lucki: I don't, but I love teaching. I did get an opportunity last year around September, October. A good friend of mine, Dr. Sandra McKay, who teaches at TMU, asked me to come and present to her students. So it was a one-off, but I loved it and I was able to come in and talk a little bit about the home and community care sector and how that sector fits within the broader healthcare system. So it was a great opportunity. I was there all afternoon, I could have been there all day and for the next 10 days.

Michelle Holden: A good little taste, right?

Carey Lucki: Yeah. And it's so funny, again, if you saw me at SickKids back in the day, the very first time I had to stand in the auditorium and present something, I think I was shaking in my shoes. So I've come a long way.

Michelle Holden: That's good to hear, 'cause I know that we've all been through that, those like early moments of presenting something.

Carey Lucki: Yes.

Michelle Holden: Yeah, how it's changed. Shifting a little bit, can you tell us if you've had a mentor or a friend in the past, who's really influenced your leadership philosophy?

Carey Lucki: Yeah, I have had, actually, several, and I probably couldn't pinpoint one person, because again, I've been very fortunate to have several folks in my life, both family, friends and colleagues, that have really just, all of them have given me something slightly different that's influenced my leadership. Whether that was the ability to remain calm under significant pressure, or even demonstrating authenticity to those around you each and every day. Like many of these attributes I have seen modeled or supported by my mentors and my friends. And like I said earlier, I've unfortunately also seen my line's share of poor leadership, but that also helps you shape and hone your own leadership skills, knowing how, at times, poor leadership affected me or influenced me back in the day. It's one of those things where you think, if ever I'm in a position where I'm similar to that individual, that's not the way I'm going to approach that particular task, because you sort of see the consequential effect and the ripple effect or the outcome. So good learnings from that as well.

Michelle Holden: So can you tell us a little bit about Circle of Care? So we at HIROC we know a little bit about it, we obviously, but just for our listeners who might be across Canada, what makes your organization unique?

Carey Lucki: Yeah. So Circle of Care, we just celebrated 50 years last year. So the organization came to be back in 1974, it was very, very small back then, it was a little grassroots organization led by some social workers who, really, the original vision was to support clients in the community. Most often, at that time, it was after they were coming out of hospital and they just weren't quite a hundred percent, so they needed a little extra support, whether it was food support or, again, social work type support, counseling. And that's when it started. But we've grown over 50 years, and so now Circle of Care is a fairly predominant player in the home and community care space, or the home and community care sector. We service, I think close to 15,000 clients a year.

Michelle Holden: Wow.

Carey Lucki: And primarily in the GTA is where we operate in Ontario. There are other home care providers out there, and some of them are providing services as well in the GTA, but also in the more rural parts of Ontario. We are very centered in the GTA.
What's unique, a little bit, about us, is we provide home care, and that is primarily personal support services in the home. And we have about a thousand PSWs that we employ here at Circle of Care, that provide about 1.3 million hours of care every year. But we also provide community services, I like to say those are outside of the home. They're more upstream, preventative, social care type of programs, and so those programs, I like to say, again, they're outside of the home. They're things like our transportation program, our meals program, we have an Adult Day program that really supports caregivers. So they can take their loved ones to an Adult Day program that gets them out of the house.

So, really, what you'll find in Ontario, is you'll have a blend of home care agencies that are really primarily just doing home care, PSW support in the home, nursing in the home, therapies in the home. And then there are community agencies or community support service agencies. We do both, so we kind of like to say what's unique is that we have this wraparound service for clients. Because when our PSW goes in a home and sees an empty fridge, we can quickly link that client up very quickly with our meals program, sometimes a little bit faster than the traditional system of getting organizations together to do what they need to do.

Michelle Holden: Thank you so much, Carey. Yeah, very, very well-connected organization and sounds like kind of providing many levels of service, so lots that you're working on. I'm going to pass it over to my colleague, Marc, who is going to ask you a couple more questions about Circle of Care and you as a leader as well. 

Carey Lucki: Great.

Michelle Holden: Off to you, Marc.

Marc Aiello: Yeah, for sure. Hello Carey, Marc here. And you've been talking about, of course, how Circle of Care is known for offering both home care and community support services. And so I wanted to know, you spoke and maybe a little bit about this already, but what advantages have you seen in providing this integrated care model? And how would you say that it helps outcomes for patients?

Carey Lucki: Yeah, sure. If you're living in Ontario now and you need home care or community care in our current system, let's say you're coming home from hospital, maybe it's a loved one who had a fall and they became very deconditioned in the hospital. Home care typically gets arranged very quickly, right from the hospital. Often families are quite anxious, concerned, they're asking questions like, "Will I be able to manage at home with this admission and the deconditioning that's happened?" And so home care typically gets arranged, sometimes there's some delays in that, but you'll often see a personal support worker coming in right away.

One of the challenges in Ontario though, is there's lots of organizations providing home care, and this is due to old contracts from way back when. So sometimes you'll have your personal support worker coming in from one agency, and if there was a wound, for example, and a nurse is required to come in, that might actually come from a different agency. And then what happens is, sort of the community supports are in the community, but a lot of times people aren't really fully aware of them. Even physicians or primary care doctors aren't aware, and so that gets kind lost in the fray as well. And so somebody might need a meals program or somebody could really benefit from the transportation program, but who's the one making that call and getting that organized? Sometimes that does happen, it just takes a while.

So again, I think the benefit, when we're all in there doing it all, again, this wraparound care, is, when our PSW goes in and sees a very lonely or isolated individual, again, very little food, very little family members to support, she'll tell her supervisor, one of our nurses. They'll get in touch right away and our intake department to get the transportation or a social worker involved or, again, get them on our meals program. It just happens a little bit faster, it's a little bit more integrated, a little more seamless. And I think that's the beauty of having the two services together.

Marc Aiello: Yeah, that's excellent. And Circle of Care has, of course, implemented certain initiatives to ease patient transitions, of course, from hospital to home. I was wondering if you could speak about one of these initiatives or programs and maybe tell us a bit about how they improve outcomes.

Carey Lucki: Absolutely. Way back in 2015, Circle of Care did become affiliated with Sinai Health. It's been 10 years. It was a great vision at the time, it was really about having that sort of integrated hospital to home type of continuum. And we started, I remember, a program, it was called our Social Work Care Navigator program back then. And what we did is, we took two of our community social workers and we basically planted them on the floors in Sinai Health. They have both the Hennick Bridgepoint site and the Mount Sinai Hospital site. And at the time, everybody thought we were crazy, were like, "Oh my gosh, you can't mix the community social workers with the hospital social workers. Like this is just unheard of." But we pushed and we did it. And of course, now they're all best friends and they love each other, it's great.

There was a little territorial stuff back in the day, but really, bringing those social workers in, back then, to help the hospital staff understand what really helps them. It helped the hospital understand what happens when people leave the hospital and what goes on outside those hospital doors. And likewise, our community social workers really got a good understanding of the ins and outs and flows of the hospital and how complicated it can be. So it was a real win-win back in the day. But most recently, I think what we're really proud of is, we started a true hospital to home program in late November last year, with Sinai Health. There have been a number of hospital to home programs that have been going on for a couple of years now in Ontario and quite frankly, abroad, in other parts of Canada. But we were finally tapped on the shoulder and we were asked to do this.

And this was great because this allowed us, not only to provide personal support care in the home, but also nursing and therapies, which we traditionally did not have contracts for. So it's really helped us open up our offering of services. But again, all those community support services wrapped around as well. The difference in this program is we are the one and only lead agency working with Sinai Health. So we do all the contacts at the beginning with patients, the care coordination.

The outcomes, and if you think about what I was talking about earlier, around some of the delays, communication challenges, just having that one single contact really makes a difference. It's less fragmented, there's significant reduction in delays in getting services. You don't have multiple care providers coming in and out, it's all from the same place. Documentation doesn't get lost, sometimes when patients are coming home, all of a sudden you can't find the prescription page with the list of meds and the documented dosages, you don't have the requisitions for the medical equipment and supplies. All of that becomes seamless, when it's one agency working directly with the hospital. And that single point care coordination is available 24/7, and I think those are some of the great outcomes we're seeing. Right now we've just surpassed a hundred patients since late November, and it's really been quite good. We're really pleased with the outcomes of this program, and hopefully we can scale it up.

Marc Aiello: Yeah, that's beautiful to hear. And it sounds very wholesome, like you were mentioning how things are less fragmented and the speed in which you're able to provide services to patients, and it sounds excellent. And I wanted to ask, because you had mentioned the early version of this evolved program, being the Social Work Care Navigator. And you were mentioning, in the early days, that it may have been a little strange at first going about implementing it, but how did you help people see the light? Like how did you convince people or raise awareness that this is a good idea?

Carey Lucki: That's a great question. And I'm really glad you asked it, because it came to be from the leaders, and this is so important in any organization. When the leaders at Sinai were on board, as we were on board at Circle of Care, it trickles down. And there was all the bubbling on the floors and on the ground level, but when leadership is connected at the top and agreeable and wanting to try and wanting to see the outcomes, and we can evaluate afterwards, and if it doesn't work, we pivot. But having the leaders completely together in jive, in sync, at the top, is really, I think what made this happen and made it come true. And it's still happening today, if we even mention we're going to take our two social work care navigators out of Sinai, they get very upset with us.

Marc Aiello: Right, yeah.

Carey Lucki: They say, "No, you're not."

Marc Aiello: Yeah, now you have their full buy-in and trust.

Carey Lucki: Yeah.

Marc Aiello: No, that's excellent. And I wanted to talk a bit about the Adult Day program that was launched in Vaughan, Ontario in 2022. And it's been recognized internationally and receiving commendations at the European Healthcare Design Awards. What innovative features or approaches would you say really set this program apart?

Carey Lucki: Oh, yeah. Our Adult Day program, it's like a gem, it's a little jewel in all of our, listen, all of our services are great, but this was such a special project we took on back in the day. The planning for it happened pre-pandemic, we actually had a very small Adult Day program before, and there are lots of Adult Day programs across the province as well, and also in other parts of Canada. We wanted to make our Adult Day program bigger so we could start doing things more innovative at this Adult Day program. I had gone to visit the Adult Day program back in the day, when I think Elise was due, and my mother was also ill at the same time and had dementia. And I saw cramped rooms and people couldn't mobilize freely, and they had walkers and whatnot. And I just thought, okay, we could be doing better, we could get a bigger place, we could start implementing, again, innovative treatments and services for our clients.

Anyways, that led to this whole journey of getting a new location. So in 2022, as you said, we opened up a 7,500 square foot Adult Day program that can actually accommodate, on average now, we accommodate about 60 clients on any given day. Our old one would be like a third of that, and the space is beautiful, and it's meant to be non-institution like. Nobody's parked in front of a television set, nobody gets to go near the television set, I don't even know why we still have it there, 'cause it's never turned on. Whereas if you're in long-term care, you often see people parked in front of a television set. And really, the whole point of that program is to provide a lot of cognitive and social and physical stimulation to hopefully ward off the advancement of dementia. We get folks coming in all stages of dementia on that journey, and we've had clients stay with us for up to five years.

But again, innovations, like we have virtual reality at the Adult Day program. We work with a university professor, Dr. Mark Chignell. He's got an incentivizer bike that promotes mobility while watching a virtual screen of, say, you're biking along a small path in France or Paris. We do yoga there, we have music programs, recorder programs, crafts, we have kitchen and cooking classes, lots of different activities that go on. And again, the outcomes of what we're seeing, is that this keeps folks out of ERs and out of long-term care homes. As I said, we've had people stay with us for five years, if not longer.

It's a great program. We always say, when you're having a bad day at Circle of Care, go to the ADP, 'cause it's just so nice and lovely and wonderful there. And just the interactions of the teams, with the patients and just the relief for the caregivers. 'Cause it's so hard, most of our patients have moderate to severe dementia, and the caregivers, it's tough on them. And when they can drop somebody off for the day or evening or a weekend, makes a world of a difference in their lives.

Marc Aiello: So Circle of Care was named the best non-profit employer for Workplace Mental Health by Charity Village in 2024. Congratulations, of course, again, on that.

Carey Lucki: Thank you. Yes.

Marc Aiello: Yeah. And how does your team foster such a supportive and inclusive workplace culture to be given such an award?

Carey Lucki: We also got another award too. It was a gold award from Excellence Canada for having a healthy workplace, so we were really excited by both of the awards actually. I would say, a lot of work went into this, particularly over the past couple of years. And so a big kudos to our human resources, our HR teams and the groups. Because coming out of the pandemic, especially in healthcare, especially even in our little sector, home and community care, there were so many challenges and people were so burnt out. I mean, I watched some of my own peers leave their roles as CEO. There was such fatigue across the entire healthcare sector, and it was hard. And we could see it in our employees, again, trying to get folks to come back to the office, everything had changed.

And in particular, again, we were tired, like I used to look out my living room window when I was completely remotely at home at the very beginning and see everybody walking their dogs, but I'd be on calls at 7 A.M., we were trying to source out PPE, trying to figure out the next guideline for how much PPE had to be worn, 4.3.0.2., it was just the guidelines would change every day, and so people were so tired. So we made a conscious effort to invest in our staff, invest in mental health engagement, wellness, inclusivity, support. We do our employee engagement surveys every year, we need to know what they need, what tools they need to help them do their job, and again, what can we do to support them all the time, 365 days a year.

Marc Aiello: That's excellent. And off the top of your mind, were there any critical resources that may have helped in those moments? Because you mentioned, of course, your HR team that were hugely instrumental in facilitating this.

Carey Lucki: We connected with CAMH I believe, on another occasion, because some of the work we have been doing, are trainings and education. So bringing in webinars, lunch and learns, so again, CAMH, I believe supported us with some really good information on, again, supporting mental health in the workplace. Different ideas we could share with our employees of how they can take care of their mental health, so that was a great partnership with CAMH. There were so many more, I probably can't list all of them, but again, even just having a staff engagement picnic day in the middle of the summer, in addition to all our regular staff parties, but just, again, recognizing the good work people do, having a little bit of downtime, heading outside, play a few games. We had food vendors that partnered with us, there were always prizes being awarded, just again, really thanking our staff and acknowledging them for the good and hard work that they do each and every day.

And it was hard during the pandemic, it's hard in general in healthcare, and you folks would know this too, but we have an aging demographic. It's not getting easier, a lot more complexity with our clients and demands and our staff deal with this day in and day out. So as I said, it's not easy and we've got to take care of them.

Marc Aiello: That's actually a great segue into my next question, and that's about looking ahead. And I was just wondering what your vision is for the evolution of home and community care in Ontario, and how do you see Circle of Care contributing to shaping that future?

Carey Lucki: Well, there's statistics out there, 97% of Ontarians want to age in their home, they want to age gracefully in their home, they want to even die in their home. And again, there's going to be so many more folks who are getting into that aging demographic profile, and they're that 97% who want to be in their home. And so I think the future vision of Home and Community Care is there, it's out there, it's what people want. I know our associations have been hammering away at our provincial government for the last few years, and we have seen some investments, finally, in our home and community care sector, which was great. We need more, because this is what people want, they want to be getting care in their communities and in their homes.

And so for me, the vision and the future is, our government needs to continue to invest dollars in this sector. I think we need to promote the professions of personal support worker, personal support care, and really start to showcase the value and the good that can come from a role like this. Now, I'm going to tell you something really off the wall here. I was at a conference last week or two weeks ago, and I went to this conference and they actually were using gaming, if you can believe this, gaming like Minecraft and, I forget what the other one's called, to really start to send healthcare messages out to younger generations. Because this is sort of a place where they spend a lot of their time, in gaming, not so much social media anymore. Some of that is there, but there's a lot of fake social media. But how do we start to talk about healthcare and send messaging through gaming opportunities? I thought that was very different and very innovative.

But I think about how do we start to encourage our younger generations to think about a field in healthcare. We know there's a primary care shortage on the horizon as well. We need to get people to want to be in healthcare, like healthcare, get a career in healthcare, so we need to focus on that. Very critical. And I think also, future of home and community care is really embedding us a little bit more closely with primary care. There's some great work going on in the province right now, Dr. Jane Philpott with Primary Care. How do we start to work more closely with primary care physicians to provide good care to people before they land in the ER? So how are we providing that Upstream care? And a lot of that, again, is those community social support. So I think that could be another great opportunity for the future.

And the vision of Home and Community Care is working a lot more closely with primary care and primary care hubs, I think that's another vision. Circle of Care, of course we want to be a part of that, so we are trying to embed ourselves in opportunities, for example, to work with primary care more closely. We certainly, for example, will do a lot of visits at our Adult Day program for physicians, as an example, or family healthcare teams, to let them know what are the different options out there for their patients. So education, knowledge transfer. I think being on podcasts like this and talking about the different services we offer, helps, again, to spread that information around. So the more people know, the more they can get access to good care. So we'll be involved every step of the way wherever we can get in there, that's my role of the director of Comms, Tanya, she's going to get us out there and get us involved in that vision.

Marc Aiello: That's excellent. That's excellent. I know you had mentioned, obviously gaming being a bit of a strange way to reach, 'cause it's maybe not something that's been done before. But that's really where a lot of young people are and it's meeting them where they are. And I can appreciate that strategy.

Carey Lucki: They actually were able to show a stat where somebody will look at a social media video for an average of eight seconds, but they spend an average of 22 minutes on a game. So if you can infuse something through the game, and this company had actually created a game around, it was more around healthcare knowledge about how to stay healthy and engage in healthy habits, but they formed it into a game. Yeah. It was very interesting.

Marc Aiello: Yeah. And I think now for this portion of the interview, we're going to move on to our lightning round.

Michelle Holden: Yeah, our lightning round is a chance to get to know you a little better, quick answers, whatever comes to mind. And yeah, we will kick it off. So what's one hobby or interest, Carey, that people might not expect you to have?

Carey Lucki: Not expect me to have? Oh my goodness. Gardening.

Michelle Holden: Okay. That's a good one. Good for this season too.

Carey Lucki: Yeah, gardening, for sure.

Michelle Holden: What's a book that's really had a lasting impact on you?

Carey Lucki: Oh, I just read a really good book by David Grann, and it was called The Wager, W-A-G-E-R. It was about a British ship that was part of a fleet that went down, this was back in the 1700s, it went to South America. And the book talked a lot about the horrible conditions that they had to endure as they rounded the Cape Horn, I believe it was. And then there was this mutiny on the boat, and then it was just all about the documentary of finding the survivors. It was a good read. David Grann writes some really good books, I'm going to buy another one of his.

Michelle Holden: In our research, we dug down a little bit, I'm not sure, maybe this is not true, but did you write a book before?

Carey Lucki: Oh, gosh, I did.

Michelle Holden: Are we allowed to ask you about it, is it okay?

Carey Lucki: Yes, you can. I guess you can. That is hilarious. Okay, so I did. So I wrote a book, it's like a beach read, I'm going to warn everybody now, this is not-

Michelle Holden: That's okay, we all need those sometimes.

Carey Lucki: It's like a two-day read. I don't know. Okay, I'll tell you what happened. It was around 2009, 2010, so quite a while back, and I was experiencing some insomnia, and it was driving me insane, I couldn't sleep. And I sort of started thinking up stories in my head to try to help me to sleep. And then I kind of came up with this story, and I would think of the same story every night when I was going to bed to try to help me sleep. And then I just kept adding on bits and pieces to the story. Anyways, what happened is, then I went, one summer, my family, we rented a cottage up near Lake Huron, and we stayed in this cottage called Heart House. It was actually called Heart House, and there were little hearts everywhere all over the cottage. And I don't know what compelled me, but I had my laptop with me, and I started writing the story that had been in my head, while I was up there at Heart house, so.

Michelle Holden: Oh, that's so cool. You just felt this desire.

Carey Lucki: It's just like a little romance with a little twist to the end. And I took in the whole setting, really, quite frankly, of that area up there, around Lake Huron, with the beaches, and I really sort of tried to blend that all into the book. But yeah, it's a very amateur read, I'll put it out there.

Michelle Holden: That's okay, that's very cool. We don't often get authors on our podcast, so we haven't had many-

Carey Lucki: Yeah.

Michelle Holden: So that's lovely. Marc, go ahead.

Marc Aiello: What would your younger self be most surprised to know about you today?

Carey Lucki: That I became a CEO. Honestly, never, never would've thought I would be overseeing an organization for almost 10 years. And growing the organization, when I started at this organization, I think our operating budget was about 30 million, and we're now about a hundred million. We're not a huge, huge agency, but we've grown substantially, and I couldn't have done it without all the great people that I have working here and the teams. But yeah, that's what my younger self would say, so shocked.

Marc Aiello: Yeah. That's so cool.

Carey Lucki: I was supposed to be a vet. I was supposed to be a vet in a back room, quietly, not speaking with anybody, but dogs and cats.

Marc Aiello: Yeah, no, that's fun. And what's one word that your team would use to describe you?

Carey Lucki: You know what, I would say authentic. I think they would say authentic. Yeah. I am who I am, you get what you get, there's no errors about me. And I've had that said to me a lot. Also, very transparent, integrity. I think those are the words I often hear, transparency, integrity, honesty, and really, again, no errors about me. My door's always open, anyone knows they can come in and have a chat with me, that's who I am. And I just really believe that's what we need to be as leaders, very authentic.

Marc Aiello: That's awesome. That's awesome. And last question, what's your go-to way of unwinding after a busy week?

Carey Lucki: Oh gosh. Well, God, I could list a zillion things. Like I'm looking at a bag of chips right now that's just to the left of me here. You know what, really, my way of unwinding is, I have a cottage now, and I love to head up to the cottage at the end of the week. And there's nothing that I love more than just being surrounded by the lake and the trees, and it's just quiet and just marvelling in our beautiful Ontario landscape and the nature that's up there. That is my total zone out, and I love it. It's the best, it really is.

Michelle Holden: Well, thank you Carey for joining us on Healthcare Changemakers, that's all that we had for you. It was a very, very exciting conversation. We really can't wait for our listeners to hear it.

Carey Lucki: Great. Well, thank you both. I really enjoyed this.

Thank you for listening. You can hear more episodes of Healthcare Changemakers on our website, hiroc.com, and on your favourite podcasting apps. If you like what you hear, please rate us or post a review. Healthcare Changemakers is recorded by HIROC's Communications and Marketing Team and produced by Podfly Productions. Follow us on Twitter at @HIROCGROUP or email us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.