February 24, 2006

Dear Friends of Hospice of Lansing and Ionia Area Hospice,

The Board of Directors is pleased to welcome you to the website of Hospice of Lansing and Ionia Area Hospice. Our website has been created to inform as well as educate. We have made it as user friendly as possible for patients and families facing life threatening illnesses, for people experiencing grief, for physicians and other clinicians, for those who wish to make contributions, and for anyone interested in issues related to end-of-life care.

In 1979, a group of remarkable volunteers launched Mid-Michigan’s first hospice and named it Hospice of Lansing. The volunteers were inspired by the tremendous success of Dr. Cicely Saunders in her work with the dying and their families in England. They were determined to create and maintain a hospice that was independent, community-based, nonprofit, charitable, and totally focused on excellence and kindness in its care of dying patients and their families.

In 1983, another group of volunteers founded Ionia Area Hospice. This was Mid-Michigan’s first rural hospice, and it was also nonprofit, independent, and community-based. Its outreach included many small communities and ones as large as Ionia and Portland. For ten years the hospice functioned entirely with volunteers. In 1993, its board decided to link hands with Hospice of Lansing, which had become licensed and Medicare certified. This bond has enabled both hospices’ eligible patients to have the Medicare Hospice Benefit, which covers almost all the costs of hospice care. The merger of the two agencies has succeeded in many ways, but especially in the quality of care for our patients and families.

Hospice of Lansing and Ionia Area Hospice are now served by one Board of Directors. The board has strong commitment and reflects a wide range of skills. The board oversees policy making, financial management, and strategic planning for the organization and makes sure that the hospice remains true to its original mission.

Our hospice now operates in three locations and serves ten counties. Its Lansing home hospice care service is based in an office on Executive Drive in south Lansing. Its Ionia home care service is based in newly renovated facility on East Washington Street in Ionia. In addition to care provided in patients’ homes, we also care for patients in other care facilities like nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and adult foster care facilities.

The hospice has also built a beautiful eight-suite residence in a 22-acre natural setting on Lansing’s Stoneleigh Drive. The Hospice of Lansing Residence is available to those who cannot remain in their own homes, and 2006 marks its fifth anniversary.

It is gratifying to realize that our wonderful organization has entered its 27th year. What a marvelous journey we have experienced in caring for thousands of terminally ill patients and their families. We hope that this website will be useful to you, will help spread the word about the excellence of our care, and will help us to keep growing in the years ahead. The board would like to thank Jeff Blohm and Iain Bogle of Blohm Creative Partners for their originality, generosity, and support in creating the website.

Sincerely,

John Person, President
Dr. Janet Osuch, Vice President
Charles Palmer, Treasurer
Charles Blockett Jr., Secretary
Mark Haslam
Frederick Puffenberger
Amie Ostrander
Rev. Penny Swartz
Lisa Lehman
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