New Hospice Center Planned for Waltham

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 Waltham hospice center in 2011, Graham said. It later moved to Wellesley. 

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.