OLD BROOKLYN, Ohio — “It’s really a happy place,” Kate Brown, vice president of development for MetroHealth System, said as she described the system’s Senior Health & Wellness Center in Old Brooklyn.
MetroHealth and its collaborators — the Benjamin Rose Institute, Concordia Care, and the Visiting Nurse Association’s Hospice and Palliative Care Partners of Ohio — today announced the competion of their fundraising campaign to build the center at the former Deaconess Hospital.
The campaign started in December 2007 with a $1 million challenge grant from the Kresge Foundation, Brown said. To get the challenge grant, MetroHealth and its fundraising partners had to raise $3 million more.
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“Part of what the Kresge Foundation wants to do is help you reach out to a broader donor base,” Brown said, “so our base included the foundation community here in Northeast Ohio, the corporate community, but individuals as well.”
More than 1,000 gifts later, the fundraisers met their goal.
The campaign also received a $1 million capital appropriation from Ohio. “But this really was a collaborative campaign. It was MetroHealth and our three partners. And we really did work together as a team to achieve this goal,” she said.
The money was used to renovate Deaconess Hospital as a senior health and living center. “It opened in stages,” Brown said. “The geriatric outpatient program opened in October of ’07. Long-term care opened in March of ’08. Concordia followed last summer. The hospice unit was the last to open, in late summer-early fall.”
The outpatient program offers services from dentistry to heart and kidney care. The long-term care facility has 144 beds, according to MetroHealth’s Web site. The hospice unit has 14 beds. Concordia Care is an adult day-care center.
It’s unusual to have so many types of senior services under one roof. “Our preliminary figures reflected the local demand for comprehensive senior services,” said Dr. James Campbell, chair of MetroHealth’s Department of Family Medicine and director of Senior Health.
Through May, the center has received nearly 5,200 primary care visits and more than 3,400 specialty care visits, MetroHealth said. Nearly 150 patients have received hospice services there, and more than 3,000 prescriptions are filled monthly at its onsite pharmacy.
“What we realized in doing it, and I think we believed was an appeal to the donor community, is that the facility lends itself to some outstanding program and research opportunities because you have this complete continuum of care in one facility,” Brown said.
The partners’ efforts aren’t ending now that the fundraising campaign and building are done. “We’ll continue our philanthropic effort in the areas of programming, research, education and training for medical personnel who will be working hand-in-hand with Dr. Campbell as well as the medical staff from the other organizations,” Brown said.
