Project Details:

The project involves the construction of a new 40,800 square foot Hendricks Hospice Care (HHC) outpatient service and in patient service program facility space. HHC is a non-profit entity that was started in 1982 by local community members to bring hospice care to Abilene. HHC became affiliated with the local hospital, Hedrick Medical Center, in 1993 and in 1997 started to utilize space within the Hedrick Medical Center hospital in Abilene. HHC continues to utilize 7,683 SF on the 7th floor of the Anderson Wing within the hospital for in-patient services. This area provides 8 beds, a small meeting space and a family shower space. Their counseling programs (which are a cost and not a revenue line item), are offered in community spaces throughout the service area that are offered at no cost by HHC to persons served. As a whole they serve 3 primary urban counties and 8 additional rural counties and are the only hospice service that takes children in the region. Staff is located in 3 different buildings on the medical campus. Fifty of the existing staff members work out of a 1,800 SF facility. This is made possible by virtue of the level of mobile services offered in the extended rural areas and rotation of workspace use. Based on requirements from Medicare, HHC utilizes volunteers to provide 5% of direct care to persons within the program. Volunteers typically are trained primarily to provide basic companionship support as many of the persons served suffer greatly from isolation issues.

The new facility will enable HHC to provide direct space for its counseling programs, volunteer trainings and to aggregate its administrative space. In addition, HHC will double the number of in-patient beds it is able to provide and move the current hospice program into a setting more conducive to the programming being offered to the persons served. It is anticipated that HHC will increase the number of in-patient persons served by at least 40% moving from the current 900 persons served per year to 1,260. In addition, it is anticipated that the number of persons served through their counseling programs will also increase by a margin of 25-30%. They currently serve 1,500 persons per year, at a growth rate of 25% they would project serving 1,875 in their counseling programs. As an adjunct to the benefits derived by HHC in being able to access the new space, the Hendricks Medical Center anticipates that having access to the 7th floor wing in the Anderson Building will enable the hospital to move forward with their plans to develop a neonatal NICU center.