Down the end of a corridor at Westerly Hospital, you'll find two rooms that look strikingly different from the rest of the hospital. In fact, once you walk in, you barely feel like you're in a hospital: gleaming Pergo floors, wallpaper, artwork, and flat-screen television. The beds have headboards, footboards and fluffy quilts. Wires, tubes and monitors are discreetly hidden.
You may wonder which foreign dignitary is coming to Westerly for treatment.
But in fact, the new rooms, which opened last month, are for the people of Westerly and nearby communities. Managed by Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island, they are "hospice rooms" -- intended to feel as comfortable as home for dying patients.
Hospice agencies provide care to people whose illness, if it follows its usual course, will prove fatal within six months. Hospice care differs from other kinds of medical care in that no one is seeking a cure. Instead, hospice doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains and others strive to relieve discomfort and pain, and guide the patient and family through the emotional and spiritual struggles that surround dying.
Traditionally, hospice tended to people dying at home. But many people cannot stay at home because their medical needs become too complicated or problems develop in the family. So the concept of inpatient hospice care was born. In 1993, the Philip Hulitar Inpatient Center opened in Providence, offering hospice services away from home. Nursing homes and hospitals throughout the state have contracts with hospice agencies that send workers in to help the dying.
Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island had one such contract with Westerly Hospital, and now a donation has allowed it to take the service one step further -- with the special homey rooms dedicated to hospice care.
"Hospice is a service, but it's also to some extent ambiance," said Analee Wulfkuhle, president and chief executive officer of Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island, "the extra TLC, having a facility that is more designed for comfort rather than the acute hospital setting. . . . It helps slow things down, helps people have more chance for reflection."
The money came from the Alfred M. Roberts Jr. Charitable Foundation, founded by a former Navy commander who lived in Westerly and in Jacksonville, Fla. Shortly before he died at the age of 89 last year, Roberts gave $65,000 for the rooms' renovation, and $45,000 over the next two years to expand and promote hospice services in the region. Roberts was not a hospice patient himself, but he had an interest in medical care and the needs of his local community, Foundation trustee Chaplin Barnes said.
Another grant, from the Robert Bonner family, paid for a new family room with refrigerator, refreshment center and Internet access. Bonner had died at Philip Hulitar.
One other hospital - Women & Infants Hospital, in Providence -- has had four hospice rooms for dying patients for several years.
When Westerly Hospital gets crowded, as often happens during the winter, the hospice rooms can be converted to two-bed rooms for regular patients. They will be used if necessary for acute care, as long as hospice patients are not occupying them, hospital spokesman David Tranchida said.
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