Inpatient hospice care in Rhode Island would not have been possible without the support of The Champlin Foundation. While HopeHealth (then Home & Hospice Care of RI) was founded in 1976, until 1993 hospice care was only offered in the home. HopeHealth’s first grant from Champlin helped catalyze the first inpatient center on Maude Street in Providence and filled a critical need in the community. Patients who required more specialized care than could be safely provided at home were now able to stay—with their families around them—in a homelike 10-bed unit. This facility was quickly outgrown due to the growing demand for hospice care and lack of inpatient options in Rhode Island and neighboring Massachusetts.
The Champlin Foundation again stepped in 10 years ago, making a significant contribution to support the renovation of the LEED Gold-Certified building at 1085 North Main Street in Providence that now houses the beautiful 24-bed Philip Hulitar Hospice Center. This facility, one of the largest in the Northeast, is a national model for excellence in end-of-life care and a teaching site for medical students from Brown University’s Alpert Medical School and for nursing students at many of the state’s schools of nursing. Further contributions from Champlin in recent years have helped us to reduce the principal on our bond, freeing up cash for patient care, and to upgrade data-sharing systems for our inpatient and field clinical staff. Our 300 employees and more than 300 specially trained volunteers provide excellent care to more than 550 patients each day at home, in long-term care, in the hospital and in the Hulitar Center—from Woonsocket to Newport to Westerly to Block Island—in large part because of The Champlin Foundation’s commitment to our work.