PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Northern Maine’s first hospice center is set to open in March, as construction work wraps up adapting a former bank call center into the Aroostook House of Comfort.
The new hospice center is about 80 percent complete, said Mike MacPherson, vice chairman of the Aroostook Hospice Foundation.
The nonprofit foundation purchased the former MBNA bank call center on Green Hill Drive in Presque Isle in 2015 and has been working on it since, with a few delays as the financing was finalized, MacPherson said.
“We had to gut half of the building right down to the studs and steel work. We put up all new walls, all new duct work, all new electrical.”
About half of the building already is occupied by the hospice’s organizational partner, VNA Home Health Hospice, one of the region’s providers of end-of-life home care. VNA will be managing the Aroostook House of Comfort and relocated one of its Aroostook County offices to the facility last June.
From now until February, crews will be finishing the interior of the hospice facility, completing patient rooms and other infrastructure, MacPherson said. And before winter arrives, Presque Isle’s Myrtle Tree Farm nursery will be working on landscaping features, planting gardens around the grounds and outside each of the rooms.
All told, the new hospice center will cost “a tad north of $3 million,” MacPherson said.
Most of that is from a $2.8 million loan backed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development agency, as well as $400,000 raised through the Presque Isle Rotary Club and a $100,000 grant from the Davis Family Foundation.
Creating a dedicated end-of-life care facility has been a long-time goal of MacPherson and the other volunteers who spearheaded the effort, which officially kicked off fundraising in 2010.
When it opens, the Aroostook House of Comfort will host up to six patients at a time and as many as 63 annually. It will be Maine’s fourth dedicated hospice center, along with facilities in Auburn, Rockport and Scarborough.
Home hospice services for end-of-life care have been available in Aroostook County for years, but home-based hospice doesn’t work for every family with a loved one at the end of their life, MacPherson said.
“With a home hospice, somebody can’t be there 24 hours a day. It gets to a point where family can’t take care of them,” MacPherson said. “There comes a time when they need some place to go. And the only place to go here once they can’t be a home anymore is the hospital.”
MacPherson said the new hospice center will offer a peaceful home-like environment for patients and families, and he also hopes that more people will start confronting end-of-life issues head-on. Not enough people have advanced directives for what kind of healthcare treatment they want in their last days — when they may not be conscious — and the topic is not talked about enough, MacPherson said.
MacPherson said his late father died as he wanted to — without aggressive medical interventions — after suffering a severe stroke that left him unable to swallow at the same time that he had early dementia.
“We had talked many times before that and he told me, ‘I don’t want to live with tubes coming out of me and all that kind of stuff,’” MacPherson recalls. When his father was hospitalized, he told the doctors that his dad didn’t want to be intubated and understood that he would die without food.
“He went to the VA home and within a week or 10 days he passed away,” MacPherson said. “That kind of discussion needs to be had by every family.”
