Kathleen Napoli

Growing up, I worked for my parents in my mother's restaurant and doing plumbing and heating with my father. I wanted to go to plumbing school, but my father wrote me a two-page letter about how his hip hurt and begged me to go to college, so I ended up in nursing school. I became a nurse in 2013 and worked in the hospital for about 5 years, but I was disenchanted with the hustle and bustle and wanted more time to teach patients and their families to try and keep people out of the hospital. I transitioned to acute home care where I learned bedside teaching, wound care, and procedures that were delegated to nurses. Then I found my passion in hospice in 2019 after my former manager, Roxanne Salgado, spent about 6 months telling me I needed to come to hospice. I believe that while everybody thinks it's meaningful to be a labor and delivery nurse bringing people into this world, I cannot imagine a more meaningful job than helping guide people out of this world. In that position, I had the most time with patients and families and grew professionally. During COVID, I became a clinical care manager doing nursing by phone for a couple of years. When a hospice clinical supervisor position opened up, the vice president told me I needed to be in education and made me the Hospice Education Manager. Since then, I've built up a preceptor program focusing on hands-on skills in the field rather than classroom teaching, and I work on projects including IDG AI assistance and medical aid in dying protocols. I've been known as 'the singing nurse' since my days as a patient care assistant, believing that nursing is holistic and needs to take care of mind, body, and spirit, and that music can really take care of all three.