As only the third CEO of Valley Hospice in over 40 years, Andrea Hale embodies the idea that business is rooted in soul.
While keeping an eye on the financial aspects, she leans in heart-first to the compassionate ethos of hospice and palliative care. This shows up from their two hospice care centers all the way to their in-home palliative care program, aptly known as Caring Connections.
With its start in 2007, Caring Connections Palliative Care was birthed out of Valley Hospice to be a way, as Hale explains it, “of providing care that creates the path to better quality of life.” By focusing on greater depth in family meetings and an astute eye for advance care planning, Caring Connections poised itself as a palliative care organization that could “go beyond just checking boxes and start providing what patients and their families actually needed and deserved.”
Challenged by financial setbacks and the COVID-19 pandemic, Caring Connections was consistently faced with a deficit. As a nonprofit, they chose to look beyond the numbers and keep delivering the best care possible, according to Hale. In May of this year, a $150,000 grant from a public foundation enabled Caring Connections to hire the additional nurse practitioner needed to get into full swing.
Today, Valley Hospice provides home- and facility-based hospice care across its service area in Ohio and West Virginia. The organization operates two inpatient and residential care units that include Valley Hospice Care Center South and Mary Jane Brooks Valley Hospice Care Center North and Liza’s Place.
The hospice’s Caring Connections program is currently serving about 150 home-based palliative care patients.
Despite the financial challenges that come with running a palliative care program, Caring Connections consistently leans back into its reason for being. Valley Hospice’s Liza’s Place care center is located on land that was essentially donated by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph Convent. The convent wanted to provide land for a place where people could die with dignity.
Through Caring Connections Palliative Care, Valley Hospice serves seven counties from the Ohio Valley region down to the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. According to Hale, the recent grant will allow the palliative care program to “offer the best care possible while being fiscally healthy in the process.”
With her mindset toward serving the whole person — emotional, spiritual, physical and beyond — Hale said she believes in taking this philosophy of going “hospice deep” and translating it to the level of care provided to its palliative care patients.
“Caring Connections can emulate in palliative care what Valley provides and represents for our community in hospice care,” Hale told Palliative Care News.
Hale shared a particularly touching experience from her time caring for her own father at the end of his life. He wasn’t a religious individual, but in his last three weeks, became spiritually anxious. Although he was nonverbal by this time, Hale was able to give her dad a scapular from his Byzantine faith that had been in the family for generations and pray with him.
As his anxiety visibly decreased, she was reminded of the soul of hospice that brought her to this vocation. The experience furthered her passion for ensuring that both the living and the dying receive the best care possible.
With an eye toward the future from both a business and soul-centered foundation, Hale is leading Valley Hospice and its Caring Connections program into the next phase of identifying gaps in the care continuum. Currently, this is taking shape in the form of finding ways to deliver quality primary care at home.
