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/.
Kylyn Mead, director product development at Careline Physician Services, has been named a 2024 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.
Mead sat down with Hospice News to talk about her career trajectory and the ways the industry is evolving due to market and regulatory forces and the COVID-19 pandemic.
What drew you to the hospice space?
I’ve been involved in post-acute care for some time. Both of my parents were in post-acute care, so I’ve been a hospice volunteer since I was 16.
I remember my first patient’s name. I remember he didn’t look like a hospice patient, and I couldn’t understand why he was on hospice. My job was to take him to get his haircut. He also wanted to get something from Burger King, but he didn’t have any money. So he went to the bank, and the teller knew him and just gave him cash without identification, and I just fell in love with the patient.
What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since starting to work in hospice?
I think what I’ve learned the most about hospice and why I love this space is that every day you get to go home thankful for something. So it’s not so much lessons, but it’s gratitude. Maybe that’s what I’ve learned most from the space, a little humility and a lot of gratitude.
If you could change one thing with an eye towards the future of hospice, what would it be?
When we talk to patients about electing the benefit, I love to say, “Would you like more nursing service at the bedside and aide services and durable medical equipment and medications covered related to the diagnosis.” People say, “Oh my gosh, Sign me up. That sounds wonderful.”
Then you say, “I just have to let you know this benefit is called hospice,” and they’re like, “I’m never doing that.”
Taking an eye towards the future, we need to really demystify the word “hospice.” It is hopefully something that we can do when we talk to our patients and our families.
We need to really begin taking an upstreamist approach to hospice, pushing these decisions upstream as further as far as we can to demystify this benefit.
What do you foresee as being different about the hospice industry looking ahead to 2025?
I think big business has gotten into hospice, and I think sometimes that’s really good because competition breeds quality. I don’t think for-profit hospice is bad at all, but I think we have to understand the intent of the benefit and really, as we look towards the future, make sure that the intent of the benefit is at the top.
The organization has to have the heart for the benefit. This is mission work.
In a word, how would you describe the future of hospice?
Alive. I think hospice is about enjoying the living and celebrating life. It’s not all sad and bad and dreary. It’s living.
If you could look back to your first day working in hospice and give yourself any advice, what would it be and why?
One piece of advice for myself then, or anybody going into it, is to keep a really open mind. I truly believe this is the best work I’ve ever been in. There’s only two times in medicine where you get appropriate intimacy with your patient, and it’s birth and it’s death.
You don’t realize how much you get out of this work. It is the most rewarding. We get way more than we give when we’re in this industry.
To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.
