Illinois-based Oasis Hospice & Palliative Care Inc.’s journey to open a new inpatient facility came with obstacles, but that has not slowed the hospice’s growth trajectory, according to CEO Hakeem Bello.

Dubbed as House of Goshen, the 4,000 square-foot, prairie-style hospice facility opened recently and features 14 patient rooms. Located in Flossmoor, Illinois, the center’s campus spans 2.24 acres in an urban area surrounding Chicago.

The inpatient facility marks an important growth milestone for Oasis Hospice & Palliative Care, which stepped into the hospice landscape nearly a decade ago, Bello told Hospice News. The faith-based organization provides hospice and palliative care services across three counties in Illinois.

Photo courtesy of Oasis Hospice & Palliative Care Inc.

How has Oasis Hospice & Palliative Care evolved since its inception?

My wife (Sade Bello) and I began dreaming of opening a hospice agency about 12 years ago. Our dream initially was to have a hospice house for patients that needed higher levels of symptom management. 

We obtained our Medicare license in June 2015, and everything really started by faith. Our license to operate the new facility came more recently. We didn’t have the finances to go with that, and the shortage of nurses and doctors hasn’t made it easy. It’s been a journey of faith and trust that this dream to open the House of Goshen became a reality. It’s not just a hospice facility; our corporate office is also in the space.

Believing in this dream and manifesting it into actualization took a while. The financial challenges were huge, it seemed like an impossible task financially. It was purely a miracle that we got all the money required to buy the land and construct the building. We also did a feasibility study. As a very small agency, we only had around 25 patients at the time and were actually laughed at for having such a small population.

The challenges were real, they were painful. But we had people who believed in this vision, and that pushed us through.

Photo courtesy of Oasis Hospice & Palliative Care

Can you elaborate on the challenges in hospice care delivery, and how your organization has navigated them?

For Oasis’ hospice services, from the onset we realized how important it is to hire the right clinicians that can adequately assess patients’ conditions. From admission to case management, that whole team of doctors, nurses, social workers, volunteers, chaplains and psychosocial support is incredibly important to sustainable care. But hiring nurses during COVID was really, really challenging because there was a lot of demand.

We were really blessed to have people who had been with us for a long time, but it got worse in terms of finding quality people to recruit during the pandemic. Quality of care became sort of watered down by financial struggles. We wanted to find staff who are compassionate about hospice and wouldn’t jump ship because someone offered them more money per hour. We see that a lot in health care right now, where the organization with the most money gets the nurses, it’s really brutal.

Also, the hospice industry is facing real challenges and pressures from the outside world. Leaders have to make decisions every day around the balance between their bottom line and advocating for the needs of patients and their families. There’s a lot of illegal activities going on in some areas, and it’s just sad. We need to have a clear vision and mission of being known for integrity and doing everything we possibly can to care for patients — that is our ultimate goal.

Our end result is having strong quality scores and knowing we can face the challenges. It’s a continuous, one step at a time process, but you keep moving forward. The hospice world is changing, with a lot of agencies buying everyone else out that are getting bigger and bigger. That is a difficult, real struggle as a growing agency, to face hospitals and health systems that have bigger budgets and bigger reach.

What have been some of the biggest takeaways from your growth experiences?

I think it’s about maintaining a solid foundation and having a strong mission to lead your team. We want to increase patient census, ensure family satisfaction and get to the bedside within 24 hours of a referral. That objective is vital. So we need staff that know when a patient is appropriate to admit to hospice. It’s also having clinical staff to support your patient ratio.

It’s also about having a consistent pipeline of different people with different experiences. That can help strengthen your referral relationships by having a staff who understand their unique needs and can have effective, constant communication with referral sources.

Also, our faith is a big part of the value we bring to the table. It’s not forcing our faith on others, we respect all beliefs. But our faith has brought us to where we are today, and helps us put the practical pieces into place.

What do you see as the most significant keys to hospice sustainability?

Hospices today have to have the right team and very focused leaders to execute goals. The sustainability of hospice is really about being true to your mission and focused on that goal to provide good care.

In hospice there’s this snowball effect. Educating doctors, nurses and clinicians in other fields about our services is huge, as is community education efforts. That education has a way of gathering momentum and it just keeps rolling.

There are a lot of pieces that attach themselves to your hospice’s story, but the end result is really celebrating the outcomes. We celebrate it if we discharge a person who no longer qualifies for hospice. It’s a misconception that hospice is a place people go to die. People can be on your services for a couple weeks and be discharged and live for several more years, while others can be on hospice for longer stays. Whether discharged or passing away on hospice, the real question is about their experience. Our ultimate goal is to provide a good experience and be the hospice someone picks for their loved one.

Sustainability in this hospice age requires being real, honest, adaptable and having strong community connections. It’s the overall commitment to the best possible quality care for your patients and their families. What’s missing right now is the focus on building relationships with other health care providers, community organizations and faith-based organizations. Technology can help us embrace wider communication and help us better care for our patients, but we still have to have that foundation, that strong mission to lead our strategic goals.

Can you share details about Oasis’ strategic growth plans in both the hospice and palliative care spaces?

Our goal is to make ourselves a brand that people recognize as having an ultimate goal of really caring for people at the end of life. We’re definitely going to open another location in the future. We are starting to think about the next building already, and we’ll see how the next year goes. House of Goshen is our first facility, and we want to duplicate this. We are hoping to have four locations in Illinois as our goal and we’re looking to see where else we can offer something like this.

Aside from the inpatient facility, we want to make sure that people can go back to wherever they call home. We are dreamers and we’re dreaming bigger. There are always going to be obstacles, but our job is to keep moving and break free until we get into the end zone of realizing our vision.

The hospice industry is changing, and we want Oasis Hospice & Palliative Care to be part of that change, to be consistent in care and have integrity. Our number one goal during staff orientation is to hire people with integrity who don’t go out there and misrepresent our services. We want to be the difference in quality at the end of the day.