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

Hayley Powell, Clinical Operations Manager at PalliCare, has been named a 2023 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.

Powell 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 field?

I actually have always really enjoyed learning more about the dying process. Death is just as amazing as people giving birth. Learning about that and being able to be with families through the hard difficult times is very intriguing to me.

Several are nurses in my family that I’ve always looked up to, and it just seemed like it would be a good career choice for me.

What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since you started working in this field?

Having gone from being a hospice nurse in the field and an inpatient unit to working as the clinical director for community-based palliative care, the biggest thing that I’ve come across is: There are so many patients that fall through the cracks of health care these days.

They don’t qualify for hospice, but they obviously have a chronic illness that needs to be managed or they still want to get therapy. So it’s just kind of learning how, in palliative care, we’re paving the road.

There are a lot of patients that could benefit from palliative care, but the education in the community is just not there. That’s the biggest hurdle that we’ve come across in the past two and a half years since we’ve been a company.

If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of hospice and palliative care, what would it be?

It would definitely be how people view hospice and palliative care. People still think that if you get on hospice that you’re gonna pass away the next day, and it’s just a need to get a lot of education out to the community.

What do you foresee being different about the hospice and palliative care space as you look ahead to 2024?

I definitely hope that we can get into a benefit period of palliative care, that would be the most amazing thing that Congress could give us.

In a word, how would you describe the future of hospice and palliative care?

Evolving — daily, we get new guidelines; we get new CMS stuff, and it’s just changing every day.

If you could look back to your first day working in hospice and palliative care and give yourself any advice, what would it be and why?

It would definitely be to stay more open-minded to continuing education because I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I first started. I started by working in an inpatient unit. So it was very different from day to day.

Also, I would say just being open to change, to be less hesitant about that.

To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.