By Charlie Breitrose
A new hospice center is planned for a 12 acre parcel on Winter Street on
the Waltham-Lincoln line.
Hospice of the North Shore Greater Boston purchased the land in
late June and has plans to build a 20-bed hospice house on the parcel, said
Jean Graham, senior director of marketing for the organization.
“The location is on Winter Street and the piece of property has three
acres in Waltham and nine in Lincoln,” Graham said. “The facility is likely to
be sited in Lincoln because more of the land is there.”
The hospice will have views of the Cambridge Reservoir.
Need for hospices has grown, said Diane Stringer, president of HNSGB.
“While the majority of hospice patients spend their final weeks in their
own homes, a growing number have care needs that are simply too complex to be managed
in the home setting,” Stringer said. “We also are caring for more pediatric
hospice patients, and there is no facility outside of a hospital that can
provide the needed level of care for dying children and their families.”
The group founded the Kaplan Family Hospice House in Danvers, which was
the first license hospice center in Massachusetts when it opened in 2005. More
recently, they purchased a Braintree hospice center in 2011, Graham said.
While the original center is convenient for the North Shore, Graham said the group
wanted to open new locations, Stringer said.
“We’re caring for more patients in Middlesex, Suffolk and Norfolk
counties and oftentimes it is not convenient for them to travel to our
inpatient hospice facility in Danvers,” Stinger said. “Our patients, and our
hospital partners, have been anxiously awaiting our development of an
additional hospice facility in the Metrowest area to better serve their needs.”
In 2012, the organization cared for more than 900 patients who resided
within 20 miles of the proposed site, Graham said.
The facility is in the early stages of the permitting process, Graham
said, and will be filing the necessary paperwork in both Waltham and Lincoln.