Hospice provider Care Dimensions has tapped Dr. Stephanie Patel as its new CEO, upon the retirement of previous top executive Patricia Ahern. Patel has been chief medical officer for the organization since 2006.
Care Dimensions is the largest hospice provider in Massachusetts.
As CMO, Patel worked to develop specialized patient programs, recruited and mentored clinical teams, and provided education to clinical referral partners about hospice and palliative care.
Additionally, Patel is a fellow of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and speaks locally and nationally. She is an instructor for physicians in the Harvard Palliative Care Medicine Fellowship Program.
Hospice News spoke with Patel about the issues that are top of mind as she takes the helm, Care Dimensions’ robust clinical education programs and the competitive landscape for hospice providers.
You are stepping into this role during a very turbulent time in health care. What are your top priorities?
My top priority is staffing, I think that is the number one thing — retaining and recruiting staff.
Like a lot of people in health care, we’re still struggling through the pandemic. It’s still continuing to get our staff and patients and families through these continuous surges and fears around the pandemic.
We haven’t completely gotten through all of what we’re going to see from the pandemic, so I think that is still at the top of our mind.
I think the pandemic has led to people delaying their health care. We’re still trying to get patients and families back on a pre-pandemic course. We’re seeing even later referrals that we used to see. So people are even delaying hospice, not just their regular medical care.
We need to provide education and continual discussions with not only our providers, but also with families and patients around the importance of hospice and how we can help them.
Modern Healthcare last year named Care Dimensions as one of the best places to work in health care and identified empathy for employees as a key differentiator. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re demonstrating that empathy?
We’ve introduced more wellness programs, more flexible scheduling and more job sharing.
We’ve made a shift over the whole course of the pandemic around individualizing people’s positions and making their jobs very flexible, looking at what their interests are, what is the fit for them in the organization.
We have been thinking outside the box to bring in other individuals to help staff with some of their everyday jobs. We’ve increased the number of licensed practical nurses. We have increased the number of ways we can touch patients. That helps relieve some of the work that we put on our nurses and social workers.
We also take the time to really listen to the staff, a lot more town hall meetings, where staff can ask questions. We’re being very transparent about what’s going on in the organization and what’s going on in health care.
More than ever, we’re asking the staff what else we can do for them, what else do they need.
How have you seen the needs and priorities of employees change during the past few years, whether through the pandemic or other factors?
Everyone has seen a greater desire for better work/life balance. People want to spend more time with their families, more time at home.
I also do think that a lot of the reasons people stay here is that they are drawn to more mission-driven organizations, and they want to make a difference. I think that’s somewhat related to the younger generation.
People are looking for a lot more mentorship and time to learn the field. People aren’t just going to jump right into hospice with no experience.
They’re asking a lot more questions about orientation and onboarding. I’ve even gotten this from physicians that I’ve been recruiting. They want a lot more time learning the organization and the field. That is part of the reason we started our residency a few years ago.
Can you share “the origin story” of the residency program?
The residency actually came out of a grant that was funding nursing education.
We were trying to fill this void, where we saw people who were very reluctant to come into hospice, because they didn’t didn’t know what it was, or they thought it was for people who work towards the end of their career. But they didn’t understand all of what it actually entailed.
Our hope was that if we created this residency, we could build a pipeline of nurses who had exceptional training and could then go on and train further nurses. It would open up the opportunity, and show how rewarding it could be to be a hospice nurse and how it differs from other fields.
It’s six nurses at a time, and it’s really open to any nurse. We have a new graduate track and then a different track for those nurses that come in with experience.
I think most nurses get the experience of being in a hospital, and this is something totally different. There’s not enough opportunity for them to learn hospice or even home health.
Were there regulatory standards associated with a nurse residency or an accreditation that you needed to obtain?
There weren’t any real regulations. There really is not that much guidance out there for nursing residency, not like there is for physician fellowships or residencies or internships.
We did partner with Regis College and their school of nursing during the first two years.They helped us develop some of the curriculum.
A few years ago Care Dimensions launched a Learning Institute. How has that program evolved in the years since it was established?
It really came out of the need for education around end of life and serious illness and just caregiver support.
There’s so much that program does, ranging from educating clinicians all the way to just educating laypeople and the general population. I think that it has become much more robust, much more.
A lot of it was in person, and now it’s now transformed more into webinars and online discussions, which have actually allowed it to expand across the country. It was very much centered around Massachusetts, but we now have people in other parts of the country attending webinars, seminars and teaching programs.
How do you feel about the competitive landscape and hospice right now as more large companies and private equity firms move into the space?
In Massachusetts, we’re very lucky because the predominance here is still not-for-profit hospices and health care organizations. We haven’t actually seen a lot of private equity.
My concern is always about the quality of care and whether private equity will change what hospice has been for so long. A lot of organizations were started as grassroots, so it’s a big shift for something that is such a personal, individualized type of care.
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