Julie Roca

I've been working in the healthcare industry since 2017, and for the past two years, I've been a Healthcare Relations Rep at Community Hospice and Palliative Care. My goal is to be able to care for patients for 6 months to a year so they can continue to do all the things they love and not be going to the hospital. Before this role, I worked for four years with Next Step Senior Solutions, a placement company where we did consulting and helped seniors get the proper services they needed at the right time in life, and I still do that on the side. I'm one of the founders and on the board of the Healthcare Professionals of North Florida. My journey into end-of-life care has a deeply personal origin. When I was in my young 20s, I lost my grandmother. Prior to that, I had always thought I wanted to be at the start of life as a doula or midwife for babies. But in losing my grandmother, we had such a wonderful hospice nurse that was so patient and helped to empower our family to be able to care for her at home, and that changed my direction to wanting to help people and serve them at the end of life. That was impactful because one person changed my life just by being wonderful, and I love that part of my story. I wish I could go find her again. What I'm most proud of professionally is the ability to educate people so they know and understand the services that are out there for them. One of the biggest challenges in my field is overcoming people's fears. People fear hospice because they think that they are quitting or giving up, and in reality, they're not doing that. They're switching their level of care from being curative to comfort measures, and you can do that for days, weeks, or years to get quality of life. It's not giving up, it's just changing the level of care.