AAHPM reached out to the 2024 Emerging Leaders to gain insight into what motivated them to pursue leadership positions and what they find more fulfilling in their experiences. Daniel Shalev, MD has been recognized as one of the exceptional individuals chosen as a 2024 AAHPM Emerging Leader in Hospice and Palliative Care.
Who has most influenced your work and how have they shaped your contributions?
I’ve been fortunate to have many impactful and dedicated mentors who have profoundly shaped my journey in hospice and palliative medicine. Dr. Vicki Jackson, our current president-elect, has been an especially huge influence on me. First of all, Vicki taught me and role modeled for me that my professional identity and work do not need to be siloed in one domain. Vicki’s leadership, clinical care, and research are not parallel, isolated endeavors in which she excels. She has an inspiring ability to see how each of these parts of her professional identity fit together like puzzle pieces to create an impact that is greater than the sum of its parts. Over the past few years, during periods when I felt like my research was isolated from my goals as a clinician or my desire to help advance the field, speaking to Vicki has helped me leverage the connections in my work and move it forward meaningfully. Relatedly, Vicki has a really expansive ability to situate the work she does in the broader context of our hospice and palliative medicine community (there’s a reason she’s our president-elect!). Her capacity to do this has inspired me to make a practice of asking myself how my work contributes to our community and our patients more broadly. This has helped me find more meaning in my work, collaborate with colleagues more effectively, and overcome feelings of stagnation that inevitably creep up sometimes.
What is the significance to you of being recognized as a “Emerging Leader” in Hospice and Palliative Medicine?
I’m profoundly honored to be recognized as an “Emerging Leader” in Hospice and Palliative Medicine. My journey into palliative medicine has involved several “leaps of faith.” After college, I planned to pursue a PhD in history. My work on the history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic exposed me to powerful narratives of living well and meaningfully despite serious illness. After graduating from college, I felt increasingly called to pursue a career in medicine to help people thrive in the face of life-limiting illnesses. I ultimately withdrew from my history studies and completed science coursework with the goal of becoming a palliative care physician. As a medical student enriching my interest in palliative care, I was struck by the burden and impact of psychiatric symptoms among patients with serious illness. My experiences inspired me to pursue residency training in psychiatry before completing my palliative care fellowship. Though this is now an increasingly common path into our field, it was much more unusual when I was in medical school. Many fellowship programs at the time specifically required training in internal medicine or family medicine. However, by heeding my passion and having confidence in the needs I was identifying in my patients, I’ve been able to build a career that is more meaningful and rewarding than I ever could have hoped. That my journey is also allowing me to contribute to our field’s advancement as a leader makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world.
What is your aspiration for the evolution of hospice and Palliative Medicine?
In the most concrete sense, much of my work has focused on empowering palliative care clinicians to better meet the mental health needs of people living with serious illnesses. As our expertise in managing the physical manifestations of serious illness continues to improve, I believe that helping our patients meet the existential, social, and psychological challenges of serious illness will be paramount. We already have incredible resources as a field. Most notably, I am constantly awed by the transformative leadership of palliative care social workers. I hope that we can “grow our tent” in these domains and by expanding the palliative care IDT to include psychologists, psychiatrists, music/arts/recreational therapists, and other psychosocial clinicians who can contribute to patient care and extend our field’s expertise. As an associate editor of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, it’s been incredibly exciting for me to celebrate scholarship on psychosocial palliative care from a range of disciplines. More broadly, I hope that our field can continue to demonstrate that it is the standard of care for all people living with serious illnesses and the ideal place in which to embed and evaluate more comprehensive approaches to caring for people with serious illnesses. I particularly hope our field takes increasing ownership over providing high-quality serious illness care for people who experience structural vulnerabilities, such as individuals with serious mental illnesses.
Learn more about the AAHPM 2024 Emerging Leaders in Hospice and Palliative Care and view a full list of all current and past Emerging Leaders.