Valley organizations provide hospice options
RANDI BAROCAS
Staff Writer
While the overwhelming majority of hospice care is provided in the home, that is not possible for all patients. Often, patients may already reside in a nursing home or need more care than their families and loved ones can provide at home.
Here in the Valley, organizations such as the nonprofit Hospice of the Valley and for-profit Dignita Hospice Care are working to create new hospice options - home-like facilities for patients who simply can't get the care they need at home.
These "homes" are a new trend in hospice care, says Susan Goldwater, executive director of Hospice of the Valley, which is planning to build such a facility in cooperation with Kivel Campus of Care.
"We've been in conversation for two years with a vision of a beautiful, home-like, serene place on the campus of Kivel," Goldwater says. "It would be centered around patient and family being together until the end. It would not be glitzy and glamorous; it would be earthy and homey."
Some such hospice homes already exist in the Valley, one of the few communities in the country to have them, says Gary Polsky, president of Dignita Hospice Care, which three months ago opened an 11-bed hospice home in Mesa, and is currently working toward opening two others - one in Tucson and one in the Sun City area.
"This really is a brand new trend in Arizona, as well as throughout the country," Polsky says of such home-like, inpatient facilities. "It improves the quality of the last few days of (the patients') lives. Even though they come in temporarily, we are not having to move them into a hospital for a week or two at a time. They go from their home to the home-like setting, instead of going from home to an intensive-care setting and back."
While Dignita is aggressively moving ahead with plans for more home-like hospice facilities, Kivel and Hospice of the Valley are carefully weighing their options. Matt Luger, executive director of Kivel Campus of Care, and Goldwater say it will be a year or two before the Kivel/Hospice of the Valley facility is up and running. Most likely, it will be on land that Kivel already owns, adjacent to the main campus, Luger says.
The two organizations are seeking to establish a facility that would serve people of all denominations - just as all Kivel facilities do - while maintaining a "Jewish flavor" that is lacking in other Valley hospice facilities, says Luger.
The facility would provide kosher meals and Jewish chaplaincy services to better meet the specific needs of Jewish hospice patients, Luger says.
"The interesting thing is that one of the real needs that the different congregations and rabbis have identified is a lack of Jewish hospice services," Luger explains. "This is, in some way, a response to their perceptions."
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