Ohio-based Community Health Professionals (CHP) Home Care and Hospice announced that its Van Wert Area Inpatient Hospice Center will no longer accept referrals effective Apr. 1, citing high costs of maintaining the facility, as well as a goal of strengthening its in-home hospice care programs.
“We have been blessed for the past decade to be able to provide families a local inpatient service that’s typically found only in much larger cities, but costs no longer allow us to support both methods of hospice care,” said Brent Tow, CHP president and CEO. “Community Health Professionals remains strongly committed to the mission of providing comprehensive, progressive, community-based health care to the people of northwest and west central Ohio and surrounding areas.”
CHP operates 10 offices within Ohio and provides care in 15 counties. The hospice’s second inpatient facility, located in Defiance, Ohio, will remain open. The hospice indicated that it is exploring ways to transition staff from the closing facility to supporting or providing care in patients’ homes. They are also considering other potential uses for the former inpatient building.
CHP’s in-home skilled or private duty hospice services will not be disrupted by closure, according to Tow. Patients will continue to have access to personal health monitoring systems that track changes in the patient’s condition and alert health care providers when intervention is needed.
During 2018, CHP was designated a HomeCare Elite Top Agency, a listing compiled each year by ABILITY Network and DecisionHealth, that identifies the top 25 percent of Medicare-certified home health and hospice providers based on analysis of performance measures in quality outcomes, best practices implementation, patient experience, quality improvement and consistency, as well as financial health.
In addition to hospice and home health care, CHP operates three adult day care locations for seniors and offers health care services and parenting and breastfeeding classes for low-income mothers. The hospice also founded the Angel Foundation, an affiliated nonprofit that seeks to fulfill the wishes of terminally ill adult patients, similar to the Make a Wish Foundation’s programs for terminally ill children.
According to the National Hospice & Palliative Care Association, nearly 15 percent of the 1.04 million Medicare beneficiaries who died in hospice care during 2016 passed away in an inpatient facility, compared to 44 percent who died in a private resident. The remaining decedents expired in a nursing or long term care facility, or received hospice services while hospitalized.
