Androscoggin Home Care and Hospice plans state’s first
inpatient hospice.
AUBURN – The people who run Androscoggin Home Care and Hospice know that most people prefer to spend their final weeks or days at home. But they also know that isn’t always an option.
Some people don’t have family or friends who can care for them as they die. Others cannot manage the physical pain without 24-hour care.
For now, people in those situations have two choices in Maine: They can go through the lengthy, complicated process of moving to a nursing home or they can go to the hospital.
Soon, people in Androscoggin, Oxford, Franklin and northern Cumberland counties will have a third option.
Androscoggin Home Care and Hospice plans to build the state’s first inpatient hospice. It will be called Hospice House.
Dave McDaniel, the president and CEO of the Lewiston-based agency, describes it as a cross between a big home and a nice hotel.
“We’ve known that we’ve needed to do this for years,” McDaniel said.
Room for families
The home will be designed to serve two groups of terminally ill patients: those who need a place to go for two or three days while their pain medication is adjusted and those who need somewhere to die.
It will be for people who do not need the expensive, intensive medical care available at hospitals or the long-term benefits of a nursing home. It will be designed as a safe place where they can feel as comfortable as possible.
The one-story, 12,500-square-foot house will be built on Stetson Road in Auburn, next to Schooner Estates retirement community.
Hospice House will have 10 private suites, each with a bathroom and an outdoor garden.
The staff will use cellular phones instead of an overhead paging system. The meals will be cooked to order, and the floors will be carpeted. The community area will have a stone fireplace, an entertainment center and a loft where children can play.
There will be no visiting restrictions. Family and friends can stay in the private suites with their loved ones or in separate rooms.
“There will be few reminders that they are in an institution,” McDaniel said.
Dignity and comfort
These types of hospice houses have existed in Arizona and Florida for years where the demand for end-of-life care is much greater.
In Maine, where a 2002 survey showed that only 9.1 percent of people older than 65 received hospice care during the last year of their lives, hospice providers have been slower to consider the idea.
McDaniel believes one of the major reasons it’s taken so long to bring an inpatient hospice center to Maine is a specific Medicare requirement that limits the amount of time hospice providers can spend with people who are in institutions.
Medicare requires that no more than 20 percent of a hospice agency’s services be provided in hospitals, nursing homes, long-term residential facilities and other inpatient programs.
“This is a huge reason why hospice houses are not common,” McDaniel said. “They want hospice to be a community-based model, not bricks and mortar.”
The people who run Androscoggin Home Care and Hospice see it differently.
They view Hospice House as a way to honor their mission to help people live their final months, weeks or days in dignity and comfort.
Public support
About two years ago, the 38-year-old agency began planning for this project by conducting a study in the tri-county area to determine the need for such a program. The study concluded that the communities could support at least a 10-bed facility. Its Web site, www.ahch.org, includes a floor plan of the 12,300-square-foot building.
Located on a 16-acre wooded lot, the house will be staffed with two nurses and two certified nursing assistants at all times. Other than that, the patients will receive hospice services the same way that people at home or in nursing homes do.
A team of specialists, including a physician, a nurse, a home health aide, a social worker, a chaplain, bereavement experts and volunteers, will be assigned to each family. The team will provide physical, emotional and spiritual comfort to everyone involved.
Androscoggin Home Care and Hospice hopes to be ready for its first patient in 2005.
The fund-raising campaign to come up with the $3.5 million needed to build the house has already begun. McDaniel declined to say how much money has been raised so far. But, he said, the agency could start seeking public support this spring.
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