Hopeful for the hospice house

Last week, Campbell County Health and the Northeast Wyoming Community Health Foundation announced that they were working together to look at bringing back inpatient services to the Close to Home Hospice House.

For many, I’m sure the announcement came as a surprise. The split between the two sides was so public and was drawn out over a couple of years.

Bridges had seemingly been burned, never to be crossed again.

But wouldn’t you know it, those bridges appear to be on the mend. In their announcements, CCH and the foundation both said they’ve been in talks about what it would take to reopen Close to Home.

“Our primary focus is the well-being of our community, and we are committed to transparency as we engage in these preliminary discussions,” CCH said in a press release.

We hope this is true. A lack of transparency is much of what caused the uproar in the first place.

The facility opened in 2010, a partnership between CCH and the foundation, then called the Campbell County Healthcare Foundation. The land it was built on belonged to CCH.

The $7 million house was paid for with $3.5 million from community donors, many of whom were justifiably upset when CCH quietly stopped inpatient services at the building in the fall of 2020.

When you’re a government entity, it doesn’t matter if you have all of the logic and common sense going into a decision, or if that decision is being made on a whim. If you don’t let the public know about it, they will get upset, and their trust will be eroded.

But enough about the past. CCH and the foundation are looking forward. Nachelle McGrath, executive director of the Northeast Wyoming Community Health Foundation, said that the change in leadership at Campbell County Health has made a difference in the renewed conversations, which have been going on for months.

“It’s something to be said when two entities don’t agree on something but we can come together and respect one another’s sides,” she told the News Record last week.

Whether things can be hammered out remains to be seen. For the better of the entire community, we hope that these two sides succeed.