Longview-based Community Home Health & Hospice is opening a 10-bed facility in Salmon Creek in May, fulfilling a long-term goal to expand into Clark County.
Five years ago, the company began looking for land, anticipating the need for more beds based on the growing elderly population. In Washington, the number of seniors is expected to escalate over the next 15 years. The 2000 U.S. Census estimated that there were 84,085 people over age 85 living in the state. By 2030, that age group is supposed to shoot up to nearly 216,000.
“It was clear we needed to build additional capacity,” said chief executive officer Greg Pang.
The campus on Northeast 134th Street is close to Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center. It’s set on 6 acres, half of which is wetlands; the campus will be built on the other 3 acres.
“It provides this serene, quiet setting, so you feel like you’re out in the country,” Pang said.
Community Home Health currently offers outpatient services and grief support groups out of a leased facility in Vancouver. The clinical field staff working there will move to the Salmon Creek facility when the lease runs out, Pang said.
The second phase of the project calls for an 8,700-square-foot grief support center and memorial garden.
“Anybody who’s experienced a loss and needs a comforting hand … they are welcome to come to our program free of charge,” Pang said. “Whatever it is they need, it’s just providing a space for them to process their grieving.”
About one-third of people using bereavement services in Longview knew someone who went through hospice; the rest are community members dealing with another kind of loss. The support groups are informal and participants get to decide how often they come, said company spokeswoman Marykay Morelli.
“It’s basically an open-ended invitation to heal,” Morelli said.
The finished facility next to the hospice will have age-specific rooms, a kitchen and a conference center. The community has already expressed interest in using the conference center for town hall meetings, Pang said. He also plans to collaborate with Washington State University Vancouver to expose more nursing students to end-of-life care.
“The presence of a conference center allows us to have clinical programs there,” Pang said. “It’s more education space that can be used.”
While the Longview grief support center has about 85 participants, Pang expects the Salmon Creek location to be two to three times as busy because of Clark County’s larger population.
Construction on the center is expected to start in 2017 and be completed in 2018. After that, for the third phase of the project, another 10 beds will be added to the hospice.
