Good Samaritan Hospice, a community-based nonprofit, is poised to bring the first freestanding hospice house to the Roanoke Valley this year, helping to address a critical need outlined in the 2023 State of the Commonwealth Report on Death and Dying in Virginia.
The 16-bed facility, called the Sheila S. Strauss Hospice House, is set to welcome patients this fall on a hilltop over Peters Creek Road in Roanoke. On Friday, the organization will hold a ribbon cutting for the new facility.
The lead gift that kicked off the capital campaign came from Maury Strauss, a longtime Roanoke businessman and philanthropist. The hospice house was named after his late wife, who was a client of Good Samaritan at the end of her life.
Good Samaritan has offered home-based hospice services for 30 years across about 13 counties in Southwest Virginia. Those services will continue, but the new facility will provide another inpatient option for clients who need a higher level of around-the-clock care, according to Dr. Jennifer Easterday, Good Samaritan’s medical director.
“We’re in the hospitals everyday. We have patients who never get to leave the hospital,” Easterday said.
Hospice houses are designed to resemble a home-like residence where terminally ill people with complicated care needs can receive short-term end-of-life care. Hospice homes can help support individuals in a pain crisis whose medications need close monitoring, or can provide inpatient respite for family caregivers.
The CEO of Good Samaritan, Aaron Housh, first started looking for property in 2019 with a few requirements. First, he wanted the new facility to be located just 15 minutes away from the two major health systems in the area, Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital and LewisGale Medical Center. He also looked for property that was close to Interstate 81 to ease travel for those coming from the surrounding rural communities.
Once it was time to start the design process, he had a few more stipulations. He wanted bright natural light and a way to hide things like laundry bins and other unsightly but necessary equipment. The result was floor-to-ceiling windows and clean, white cabinets, not unlike ones you might see in a family home. Even the courtyard was designed with a track of gleaming white cement to accommodate family members in need of a quiet place to pace.
“When you do a project like this, the roots go deep,” Housh said. “I often joke that I had a baby with Good Samaritan.”
While the population of Southwest Virginia is aging faster than other parts of the state, the inpatient hospice options are few and far between, and most patients enter end-of-life care in the hospital, Housh said.
It’s estimated that more than 78,000 people over the age of 60 live within the service area of the Local Office on Aging, which includes Roanoke, Craig, Allegheny, Botetourt and Roanoke counties, and the cities of Roanoke, Salem and Covington, according to data from the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
Across the state, nearly 1.9 million residents are over 60; by 2030, this population is expected to grow to 2.2 million, according to the State of the Commonwealth report.
Despite the growing aging population, there were only eight freestanding hospice houses in the state of Virginia in 2023 — or 0.02 hospice houses per 30,000 residents, a notably lower per-capita number compared to adjacent states. West Virginia, for example, has one hospice house for every 30,000 residents.
The nearest hospice houses to Roanoke are in Beckley, West Virginia, and in Greensboro, North Carolina. While Charlottesville does have an inpatient hospice unit, it is located in a larger facility, and not freestanding.
While there is a shortage of freestanding hospice home facilities in the state, the competition for home-based hospice services is high, Housh said, due to an influx of for-profit hospice companies.
There are 115 for-profit home-based hospice providers in Virginia and only 38 nonprofit providers. This level of competition is, in part, why it’s taken Good Samaritan 30 years to achieve its founding goal to open an inpatient facility in Roanoke, Housh said.
The facility will provide wraparound services for its patients and families including pain management, bereavement counseling, spiritual support and social workers, and it will have the capability to provide intensive care unit support.
Throughout the history of Good Samaritan, administrative offices have been headquartered in leased spaces. When Housh found the 6-acre property in Roanoke for the hospice house, it was decided that the wing opposite the medical facility would support the home-based care offices and administration.
In total, the project will cost $13 million, and as the capital campaign continues, the nonprofit will need to raise another $1.7 million in the next six months to complete the project. The funding so far has come from several gifts from organizations around the state.
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Correction, 7 p.m. June 7: Comments in an earlier version of this story from Good Samaritan CEO Aaron Housh about the extra time that workers spend with patients, and the money lost during that time, referred to the nonprofit’s palliative care services and not to the hospice house. The story has been corrected.