“Working with the Heart”: Meet Gladys Escalante, Partners in Care Home Health Aide
Gladys Escalante has only been with Partners in Care for a short time, but has two decades of experience in the field of home health care. “I switched to Partners in Care because they have better benefits than other companies; like health insurance,” she explains.
Gladys came to New York City from Ecuador more than twenty years ago to care for her mother who lived here. The first years in this city were the hardest for her: “When I arrived, I didn’t know the language,” she says. “That was the most difficult. But once you learn the language, everything improves. This is a country where you can get ahead if you work and make an effort.”
Today, Gladys lives in Woodside, Queens, with her three daughters, and her mother lives in the apartment across the street. “I’m very lucky that we’re all together,” Gladys tells us. Then she adds proudly, “My oldest daughter is studying to become a lawyer. The other two are twins, they are 17 years old, and one of them wants to be a veterinarian.”
For this mother, one of the biggest benefits of her job is that she doesn’t have to go far from home, which means she’s always around if her daughters need her: “It’s nice to be able to help my daughters. That’s why I take cases that are close to home, because I’m still very involved in their education and their lives.”
As a veteran in the field of health care, she is also very involved with the improvement of her patients, who are mostly geriatric cases: “I am happy when they improve,” she says. “I have a patient who now walks and did not walk before. That is progress and it gives me joy.”
For her, this is a job that has to be done with the heart. “People who are starting out now have to put their hands on their hearts and ask themselves why they want to do this. This work must be done with the heart, not with reason,” she explained. “Because the important thing is to make others feel good and that is done with the heart.”
Gladys knows from her own experience what it means to work with the heart and the degree of commitment that it requires: “Fifteen years ago a patient died and it shocked me a lot. It wasn’t my family, but I felt it a lot,” she remembers. “She was the first patient I ever had who died and I was moved. Since then, I’ve learned not to take it so personally.”
Gladys is a person of few words, and when she arrives at a new patient’s home, she tells us she gets straight to the point: “I just show them my ID and we get to work,” she said. In addition, to deal with her most difficult clients, she has a very simple strategy: “I always ask if they want to do something before I do anything. If I want to get them up, I ask them first if they want to get up, and if they’re not ready, we talk. The important thing is that patients feel that they are taking advantage of their last years of life”.