Broad Reach Healthcare Happenings

For Jason Lavallee, stepping into the top administrator’s role for Liberty Commons is more than a homecoming for a native Cape Codder; he’s building on two generations of experience and tradition, assuming a role he always hoped to fill even if it’s all happening faster than he expected.

Jason’s grandmother began working at Broad Reach in the earliest days, 1986, serving as Liberty Commons’ first Director of Nursing and then in the role of Executive Director of the Victorian Assisted Living before her retirement back in the 2000s.

“My dad started at Liberty Commons in 1991 as a social worker,” Jason recalls, “and became its administrator in 1994,” leaving in 2000 for a job with a larger company that had a facility in Centerville. That was where Jason got his first job as a 14-year-old Dennis-Yarmouth High School student, washing dishes.

Through the 1990’s both Jason’s grandmother and father worked closely with Broad Reach’s President and CEO, Bill Bogdanovich. In 2017, when Jason was a completing his undergraduate degree, he took a summer internship shadowing Bill, getting to know something about pretty much every department in the facility’s operation. The Broad Reach connection continued: After Jason graduated from the University of New Hampshire and moved forward with preparation to become a licensed nursing home administrator, Bogdanovich again served as his mentor, known as a “preceptor” – the same key role he played for Jason’s dad twenty years earlier.

Lavallee’s began his professional career, license in hand, with a nursing home facility in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. That company owns 11 homes, a year later sending Jason to Gloucester to fill in as an interim administrator for a 142-bed skilled nursing facility that needed leadership through a transition. That went well (“I learned so much,” he recalls), and resulted in the company putting Jason in full-time charge of their Braintree facility.

“Throughout, I stayed in contact with Bill,” says Jason. “He always knew that one day, I wanted to get back to the Cape.”

The two got together for lunch at the Chatham Squire as Thanksgiving and Christmas approached, and Bill was direct: “’What would it take to get you back to the Cape?’” Jason remembers him asking. It was a question Jason always anticipated, but he hadn’t expected it to come this quickly, at 25 years old:

“I’ve always set goals for myself, three years, five years, 10 years, and I aspired to get back to the Cape, but more like in three to five years. This was two years earlier. But everything in my career so far seems to have been expedited.”

With the leadership role on the table, Jason didn’t hesitate. “To be able to come back to this organization, where my family has done so much, that’s a uniquely special thing,” he says. By the first of the year, he and his former “preceptor” shook hands, with a February 1 start.

The role is akin to being a “mini-CEO” of Liberty Commons, responsible for employees and day-to-day operations. “All I want is that we offer the best care possible and the best place for people to work,” he says. “At the end of the day, whether someone is with us to rehab for a short time or longer term, this is their home and that’s what matters most.

“The biggest immediate goal for me right now is getting through the chaos COVID has brought to healthcare. We’ve all been battling it for two years now. My career so far has been a kind of crisis management every day.”

For now, Jason is living at the family homestead in Yarmouth Port, solving the housing problem that inhibits so many people from taking jobs on the Cape. He’d love to stay in the village where he grew up, so house hunting is likely to begin soon.

But as far as his profession goes, he’s already home!