Shovels Break Ground For Ames Family Hospice House

Hospice of the Western Reserve officially broke ground for on Thursday in an effort to expand services offered on Cleveland’s west side.

After years of planning and fundraising, the hospice has begun construction on the 32-bed, 40,000 square foot facility off of Crocker Road. The new house will be the organization’s second inpatient site, serving the hospice’s growing patient base between Sandusky and Cleveland.

“What’s nice about this facility is everything that we learned from the old building, we’ve brought forward into this design,” said William E. Finn, Hospice of the Western Reserve chief executive officer. “This is the geographic reach that we’re really hoping for to have a shorter distance no matter where you live in Northeast Ohio to get to hospice facilities.”

The Ames Family Hospice House will feature all private suites, hidden medical equipment, outdoor patios, family rooms and other features to keep the facility looking and feeling like home for patients.

“These woods and this ground are being transformed to become a platform for transition for hospice patients during their crowning phase of life,” said CEO Emeritus David Simpson. “The building itself will become a channel toward comfort and peace for our patients and will become the incubator for experiences and memories that families and friends cherish forever.”

Since the Hospice of the Western Reserve opened its first house on East 185^th Street in 1995, it has grown from serving 380 to 1,250 patients in hospice care every day, along with another 450 in other services and programs, according to Finn. Once an organization that dealt only with cancer patients, now only about 40 percent of those in Hospice of the Western Reserve care have cancer.

“Growth itself has not been an organizational value for Hospice of the Western Reserve but rather it has been a hallmark characteristic,” Simpson said. “It’s been a mission-based imperative which we have embraced in order to meet the ever-widening community need that people have for hospice care.”

The project has been about seven years in the making, with thousands of donors contributing millions of dollars to the new hospice house. B. Charles and Jay Ames were present at the groundbreaking as the lead donors. The Ameses provided the a $10 million gift to get the project off the ground.

“We couldn’t be more proud to be involved in this,” said B. Charles Ames.

Other lead gifts came from The Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Foundation and Susan and Jack Turben.

“[These donations] speak to the fact that eventually hospice touches all of us one way or another,” Finn said. “And people recognize Hospice of the Western Reserve is truly different than the other hospice programs in terms of scope, service and quality, and they support that with their donations.”