Meet This Year’s Rose Madden-Baer Advanced Practice Clinician of the Year!

Congratulations to Hospice Care Physician Mary Victoria Kopke on winning the 2026 Rose Madden-Baer Advanced Practice Clinician of the Year award. This award honors a medical provider who makes a profound difference in how community care is delivered. It is named for the late SVP Rose Madden-Baer, a true innovator in community health and founder of VNS Health’s Care Management Organization. This year, there were 12 nominations for this award. To see the list of those nominees, please click here.

Ask Dr. Mary Victoria (Tory) Kopke about winning this year’s Rose Madden-Baer Advanced Practice Clinician of the Year Award, and she’s likely to change the subject. She prefers to talk about the Manhattan Lower West Side Hospice team she’s part of, or how it’s a privilege to be welcomed into a stranger’s home in the final weeks of that person’s life.

“My entire job is to support my team,” she says of the nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers and spiritual care counselors who make up the Hospice interdisciplinary care team they’ve proudly nicknamed the “Lower Best Side.” Her role is to make sure the right people reach the right homes at the right time, and to step in with the medical judgment and resources needed to help her team do their work.

Tory, who trained at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, came to the profession later in life. She was thrilled to discover during one of her rotations that home physician visits are an actual, sustainable way to practice.

“I couldn’t believe that was a job!” she says. “I thought, if I can do this, I absolutely will do this.”

She spent the following years delivering home care to elderly patients, glad to be having goals-of-care conversations at home rather than when someone is in crisis in the ICU. Hospice lets her continue those conversations in a home setting, woven into the fabric of daily life.

“So much of your life happens at home, not in the hospital,” she says, explaining why home care is such a natural fit with how we live our lives.

For Tory, the words “home care” carry a second meaning as well. Her Manhattan territory is where she grew up under the name Mary Victoria Robbins, before she started going by Tory and took her husband’s last name. Every week or two, she says, she introduces herself twice: “I am Dr. Victoria Kopke, but I’m also Mary Robbins,” she’ll tell a family, and someone will enthusiastically remember her as a former upstairs neighbor, a daughter’s childhood friend, or “Tim’s little sister.”

Tory exemplifies VNS Health’s Core Values of Empathy, Agility, and Integrity. Her colleagues praise her for going above and beyond for patients, solving complex clinical problems no matter the hour, and stepping up in compassionate, responsive ways that transcend her role.

In nominating her for this award, one team member recalled the night that Tory, well after clinical hours, sat and read aloud to a patient—an avid reader—who was alone overnight in an assisted living facility. “It was simply a quiet act of compassion,” the nomination read, calling out her deep empathy. “It spoke volumes about the clinician and person she is.”

Agility, for Tory, is about flexibility and responsiveness in a field that spans all hours and often involves rescheduling around a crisis. She always keeps her phones—work and personal—on so her team can reach her around the clock. And her integrity ensures that all vulnerable New Yorkers receive the care they deserve.

“New York City packs so many different lives into a small geography,” says Tory. Some of the homes her team enters are grand. Others are small and cluttered. Either way, her approach doesn’t change: Listen with compassion, pay attention to what matters, speak honestly, and give people comfort through the end of life in the place they call home.

“There’s no way to do this job without every member of my team,” she says. “They’re each more outstanding than the next.”