Hospital, hospitality go together

By PRESS STAFF

Kootenai Health, the Community Cancer Fund and Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Inland Northwest are teaming up to build a hospitality center for patients and their families at Kootenai Health.

Jeremy Evans, Kootenai Health’s executive vice president of hospital and regional operations, said Tuesday the hospital’s growth is allowing it to serve more people from elsewhere but can’t always find a place for them to stay.

“Over one-third of our patients come from outside of Kootenai County, and so this overnight lodging becomes really essential for these travelling patients and families,” Evans said.

Community Cancer Fund committed to raising the majority of the money for the facility as its signature project, but it's still calculating how much that will be.

“Our goal is to help cancer patients and their families focus on getting better, not worry about how to pay for lodging during treatment,” said Jerid Keefer, co-founder and executive director for Community Cancer Fund. “The hospitality center will help by providing patients and families across the region a comfortable, affordable place to stay while they are receiving care at Kootenai Health.”

Architectural design is expected to be complete by this fall. Construction of the new facility is anticipated to begin in the summer of 2018 with a targeted completion date sometime in early 2019, hospital officials estimated.

The hospitality center will include 14 adult rooms on what will be known as the Walden House side of the facility, and the Ronald McDonald House for pediatric patient families will have six. It will also include kitchen, laundry room and shared recreational spaces for families to provide each other with support. The center will offer meals, made by volunteers, tutoring and pet therapy services, according to Tamara McGregor, Ronald McDonald House Charities board member. Adult patients pay affordable rates and pediatric patients and their families stay for free.

“That’s an operating principle for Ronald McDonald House charities across the country, free lodging for patients and families of pediatric patients. Then on the adult side, as we do currently, it’s a much-reduced rate for families of adult patients and in some situations the fee is actually waived,” Evans said.

Kootenai Health Foundation built the Walden House, a nine-bedroom home for Kootenai Health outpatients receiving treatment, in 1989 and opened it in 1990 to serve the same purpose as the new hospitality center. CCF and RMHC have supported the Walden House over the years, and RMHC recently opened a family room in Kootenai Health’s neonatal intensive care unit.

RMHC will assist in ongoing operations and management of the facility. McGregor said the hospitality center will expand and improve the services already available.

“For right now, if you have a baby in the NICU at Kootenai Health, they do have sleepover rooms, which is amazing,” McGregor said. “But if that’s not your only child and you have two other children and you want to keep your family together and not be split up — on the Ronald McDonald side of the new hospitality center, whole families can stay together and that’s really the intent — to help families stay together when they’re healing from really traumatic incidents.”

Kim Anderson, Kootenai Health’s communications and marketing director, said the project is expected to get a big financial boost this Saturday at Community Cancer Fund’s “The Showcase” fundraiser.

“There are celebrity golfers that will be golfing at The Coeur d’Alene Resort and then on Saturday night, which is the big fundraising event, the attendees will get on a boat at The Resort and they will take the boat over to Fritz Wolff and Ryan Gee’s private beach home on the lake and that’s when the fundraising will happen,” Anderson said.

The center will include a display honoring the Walden family for its contribution to Kootenai Health and the overall community. After completing construction in the vacant lot in the northwest corner of the hospital’s campus, the current Walden house will be retired and removed.

“This is just a great opportunity to build upon that legacy of the Walden family and the Walden House, and it just fits beautifully with our continued growth and it’s a really cool three-way collaborative effort between Kootenai Health, Ronald McDonald Hospitality and the Community Cancer Fund,” Evans said.