By John Campbell, Community Press
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Pauline Faull, Lynda Pecora and Rosaleen Dunne set the project in motion. All have an extensive background in palliative care.
Warkworth – There’s one proposed Bridge in Trent Hills that hasn’t divided the community but has brought it together instead.
It’s Bridge Hospice which held a wine and cheese reception Saturday in Warkworth to thank its supporters and to share its plans for Northumberland County’s first residential hospice.
Unlike the controversy over where a new bridge is to be built in Campbellford, neither the site – nor the purpose – of Bridge Hospice is in question. It’s a one-acre serviced lot at the end of the Old Hastings Road at the north end of the village. Construction of the 1,500-square-foot facility is expected to begin in the fall with the opening to follow in the spring of 2011.
The residence will include three rooms where terminally ill patients can live out the last days of their lives in comfortable surroundings, cared for by staff and volunteers.
The cost to build the residence has been budgeted at $300,000 but Bridge Hospice’s board of directors hopes to raise an additional $50,000 to have in the bank for operating purposes when it opens.
More than $200,000 has been raised to date.
“I’m very pleased that we’re this far this fast because we only started really a year ago at the annual meeting,” Dr. Bob Stephens, the retired physician who chairs the fundraising committee, said in an interview.
Dr. Cheryl Gibson, chair of the board of directors, told QMI Agency that Campbellford Memorial Hospital estimates the hospice will serve 40 people a year.
“We’re looking at a co-ordinator and having the Community Care Access Centre provide some staffing,” Gibson said. The equivalent of one-and-a-half positions will be filled by nurses or personal support workers.
“Volunteers are going to be the heart of it,” she said. “We have quite a long list of people who can hardly wait to start.”
One group of volunteers has pledged to trim $25,000 from construction costs by supplying volunteer labour.
Among the people who attended Saturday’s event held at the Warkworth Town Hall Centre for the Arts were donors from Port Hope and Cobourg along with those from the immediate area. The reception was not only intended to thank them for their support and to provide an update on the project but also “to encourage them to keep being involved,” Gibson said. “Most people have fundraisers. We call this our friendraiser.”
Special tribute was paid during the evening to retired school teacher and local historian Aureen Richardson, who donated $50,000 to the hospice, and the three nurses whose dream it was for a hospice that set everything in motion – Pauline Faull, Lynda Pecora and Rosaleen Dunne
Gibson explained what a hospice is: a place where the emotional, physical, mental and spiritual needs of the terminally ill person and the patient’s family members are attended to in a setting made to feel like a home.
“It becomes a time of bonding together, a time of transition that is loving and very, very peaceful,” she said.
Her message was underscored in a two minute video scripted by former Warkworth-area resident Nina Keogh that related her own positive experience with a hospice when her mother was dying.
Stephens said the hospice will free up beds for more acute care patients at Campbellford Memorial Hospital and increase its efficiency.
He said “a generational change” has occurred, in which both spouses now work and lead busy lives, making it more difficult for them to look after loved ones in their final days.
“Hospices are becoming much more in demand,” Stephens said. “The last two weeks of life are particularly very difficult for a family – [a time of] great emotional and physical stress.”
He said the provincial government is providing no funding for the project but he expressed hope it will once the facility is in operation.
The Warkworth Community Foundation has donated $25,000 and agreed to contribute an additional $25,000, provided an equal amount is raised in the community.
“We’re absolutely full of joy,” Pecora said afterward of the project that is moving closer to realizing the dream she, Faull and Dunne first put into words more than five years ago.
“We always knew it was going to happen because this community is so full of amazing people.”
