Hospice buys property for house
Hospice of Spokane is closer to building the city’s first hospice house after purchasing property at Seventh and Chandler near downtown.
Though a survey has shown that most Americans would prefer to spend their final days at home, this option is not available to everyone. Many die at a hospital or nursing facility.
A hospice house offers acute care in a homelike environment, said Gina Drummond, CEO of Hospice of Spokane, the community’s only nonprofit hospice, which provides care to the terminally ill and support for their families. For more than 28 years, the organization has provided this service at homes or wherever the patient resides.
“Not every community has a hospice house. Spokane is long overdue for one,” Drummond said. “It will be a real community asset.”
The nonprofit Hospice of Spokane has purchased 1.5 acres near St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Center at 367 E. Seventh Ave., where it intends to build a 12-bed facility. The $5.2 million project is expected to be completed in late 2007 or early 2008.
In 1999, Hospice of Spokane purchased property at 601 N. Conklin in Spokane Valley, where it intended to build a hospice house after raising the necessary funds, said spokesman Dale Hammond. After conducting new research and hiring Drummond in January 2005, the organization decided the site should be closer to the core of Spokane’s health services.
Hammond said Hospice of Spokane intends to sell the Spokane Valley property.
The year she was hired, The Spokesman-Review reported that Drummond, who previously managed Peace Hospice in Great Falls, Mont., would supervise about 100 employees and more than 250 volunteers and an annual budget of about $8 million.
Drummond said Thursday that hospitals support the project and she expects them to transfer terminal patients to the hospice house once it is completed.
She said the hospice house will be designed by Jeff Warner of ALSC Architects of Spokane. So far, her organization has raised about $1.5 million, less than a third of the project’s cost.
“We are optimistic the community will step up to help us raise this money,” Drummond said.