Future Leaders: Sonya Dolan, Chief Operations Officer, Mettle Health

The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of senior housing, skilled nursing, home health and hospice care. To see this year’s future leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

Sonya Dolan, co-founder and chief operations officer of Mettle Health, has been named a 2021 Future Leader by Hospice News.

To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40-years-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.

Dolan sat down with Hospice News to talk about her career trajectory and the ways the industry is evolving.

What drew you to the hospice and palliative care fields?

I can thank my mother, who was diagnosed with lung cancer, near the end of my college experience. She went on to go through treatments and other things and went into remission. Ultimately it metastasized to her spine and brain, and she ended up passing away from it.

What happened was, we ended up getting hospice way too late, as many families do. I just experienced the amazingness that hospice can bring to the table, having people who know what they’re doing. That just made a really big impression on me.

I ended up quitting my job and taking some time off afterwards. But after that I thought to myself, what do I want to do? Where do I want to put my energy and the things that I care about. Hospice is one of those things that came up, because of the experience we had with my mom. So I ended up working with Hospice by the Bay [now By the Bay Health], which is one of the oldest hospices in California. I really adored everything about working with families and caregivers and all the clinicians. It was just a lovely switch from what I had been doing.

I’m not a clinically trained person, and at the time I didn’t know much about palliative care at all. So it was meeting [physician and Mettle Health Co-founder B.J. Miller] that kind of got me into understanding what palliative care really is.

I obviously wish that my mom hadn’t died, but at the same time she kind of led me to this really wonderful career. She did give me a little bit of a gift in the long run.

What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since starting to work in this field?

I think that it is incredibly beneficial to have people from outside of health care working in he field, particularly in hospice and palliative care. There’s a lot of lessons from other industries that can be applied to providing care that make a ton of sense. There are things that end up not being addressed or thought about because it is not within the scope of practice of the clinician, the social worker, the chaplain. I love the idea of bringing in other ways of thinking beyond what is already been tried in health care.

The other thing is, the stuff that I always think is really important sometimes really isn’t. It’s nice to remind yourself that that thing that feels really stressful at work or in your personal life is actually very small. There’s something really lovely about the reminder that there are people who are dealing with the end of their life or taking care of someone they may be about to lose. That was a really important lesson. It’s realizing that that person on the other end of the line is possibly going through something much more difficult than my perceived stressors.

With an eye towards the future of hospice and palliative care, you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be?

I would love palliative care to be reimbursed by Medicare in the same way that everything else is. It’s an amazing discipline with so much to give people and a lot of people can’t access it because they can’t pay for it. With Mettle right now we’re doing direct to consumer because that’s the way that we can get in right now under the door. But that’s not going to reach everyone. 

Access is super important to us, so working towards a world where our palliative care is understood to be just as important as the surgeon who removes your tumor would be wonderful.

Looking ahead to 2022, what do you see as being different about hospice and palliative care?

I hope that the interest in palliative care that we saw during the very start and height of the COVID crisis is something that continues, and having families ask for this will make a change in how it is accessed. I do hope that there’s also kind of a shift towards more home-based services, which is what palliative care is, but also figuring out a way to use these services to keep people in their homes longer.  

I think we’re moving towards wanting our loved ones to be at home. It would be amazing for hospice and palliative care to be able to provide these things with the goal of keeping people inside their home.

My dream would be that there’s also an understanding of the difference between [hospice and palliative care]. You know, I think this is one of the problems that we bump up against is conflating hospice and palliative care together. We at Mettle have a little bit of an uphill battle in front of us to make sure that people understand that palliative care is for any time along this trajectory, and then hospice is for the end of your life.

A lot of hospices are now bringing on palliative care services, which wonderful. But my worry is that that conflates them together even more, but I think it’s amazing to be able to have a whole ecosystem of care within that addresses caregiving and addresses palliative issues around serious illness, and then also can help you handle the end of life.

Looking beyond next year, how would you describe the future of hospice and palliative care?

My dream for the future of hospice and palliative care would be that people in the United States understand the difference, ask for these things, and feel that they can drive their own care. I think there’s a lot of power that is given over to doctors and clinicians, which is understandable. They’re incredibly educated, smart people. But being able to have that element of control for the patient and the caregiver, I think is so important.

People should feel empowered to ask for these things or demand them and say, “This is what I want for myself.” It should be more of a relationship than a clinicians dictating down to someone what they can and cannot do.

My hope is that everyone understands what hospice can do for you and how it works. There are a lot of misconceptions that keep people from doing it. Same thing with palliative care. If you don’t want to use it, that’s totally fine. I just want people to know what they would get with these things and then make that choice, because a lot of people miss out on care that could be really beneficial to them.

If you could look back to your first day working in the field and could give yourself any advice, what would it be? 

You can make a really big difference just by being a supportive voice on the other end of the phone. Those types of positions that aren’t necessarily management or something higher up can totally make a difference.

My first position at Hospice by the Bay was among the lowest positions, and it was lovely. Understand that you can do great things for families and patients just by being an ear on the phone. 

As long as you show up with the intention that you care, that will be understood and read by the other person. I think one of the things that hospice and palliative care has kind of disabused me of is: Everything doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s impossible for us to be perfect all the time, and that’s okay as long as the intention behind it is a positive one.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know the answer, but I’m gonna find out.”

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