Future Leader: Kate Gilday, Administrator at Legacy Healthcare

The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of senior housing, skilled nursing, home health and hospice care. To see this year’s future leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.

Kate Gilday, administrator at Legacy Healthcare, has been named a 2022 Future Leader by Skilled Nursing 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.

Gilday spoke with Skilled Nursing News about her start as a receptionist and public health student, how to better manage people and why there’s so much opportunity in skilled nursing right now.

SNN: What drew you to the industry?

Kate: I started in this industry not knowing a ton about skilled nursing whatsoever. I took a job as a receptionist at a skilled nursing facility and while I was in college, I actually went to school for public health. I was looking for something in the health care industry and I wasn’t sure where public health would take me.

As I got to know the building and the residents and the staff better, I just really fell in love with the industry as a whole. There are just so many great people you meet and so many stories and so many great conversations you have with residents, especially working as a receptionist. It was a nice intro to the field.

SNN: What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?

As it relates to managing people, making sure that we have empathy, making sure that we let that empathy carry over in everything we do. That tends to guide you, I think, in the right direction, even when times are hard and things are difficult, just remembering that.

SNN: If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of skilled nursing, what would it be?

More collaboration with our regulatory bodies. [Policymakers] need to listen to the people who are actually working in the industry. When we’re looking at trying to improve quality, especially with Covid, the regulations have been changing, sometimes every day there would be a change. With the state health departments it tends to feel like a little bit more punitive than collaborative.

SNN: What do you foresee as being different about the skilled nursing industry looking ahead to 2023?

I think that there needs to be an emphasis on ensuring that we’re funding Medicaid from a community health perspective. I think that we need to continue to invest in our health care. We need to make sure that we’re investing in getting people into working for health care at a national level. If we want somebody to take care of us one day, if we need long-term care one day, we’re going to want well trained, well compensated, well educated people to work in health care.

SNN: In a word, how would you describe the future of skilled nursing?

Opportune. There are a lot of opportunities to improve skilled nursing. We have the infrastructure, I just think that there are a lot of opportunities to make it better.

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