(Photo: TDCB)
The first residential hospice centre in Southeast New Brunswick, is expected to be ready to open by May.
Work on the $4.5 million ten bed facility on Pleasant Street in Moncton began last winter.
Board Chair Dennis Cochrane says things are progressing well, “We actually have had very little delay as a result of COVID. We are pretty well on time. We stopped it at the very beginning because we didn’t like the way the tenders were coming in, so we did some redesign work and it’s really back on track.”
Inside the facility, in addition to the ten rooms, there will be a dining room and a sunroom and four family rooms. The furniture is set up, so a loved one can sleep in the room with the client. Cochrane says, “We readily admit, it is not home, but It has a completely different atmosphere altogether than what you might get in an institution like a hospital. It is very warmly decorated and designed as a home away from home, making it as comfortable for the patient as possible and their loved ones.”
He says, right now they expect the building will be substantively complete by April 30th, “That would allow our staff to go in and put the furniture in place. We’ll take a week or two so that the clinical staff, the nurses and the support staff can work in the building getting everything set up and get all of the procedures properly in place. We would expect to take our first palliative care client, somewhere around May 15th.”
A portion of funding for the centre comes from the federal and provincial government. The remainder was raised publicly.
