100 Years of Caring at Western Massachusetts Hospital

Well, the hospital was established in 1910. It started off as a tuberculosis center. It was called the Westfield State Sanitarium back then. The hospital has changed drastically throughout the years. We used to have a nursing school on campus here. What you see is a facility that the community cares about. Because there have been several attempts at potentially closing the hospital, and each time the community kind of raises its arms and says "wait a minute, this is a hospital that we want in our area." And typically what we'll do is try to find a niche service that isn't really being taken care of, say, in the acute hospitals or in the nursing homes. And we'll take that on, bring a group of those patients together, and try to do the best we can for that diagnosis that they have, and figure out what's the best way to care for them. The hospital, this year, February of 2010, the hospital celebrated its 100th year. So throughout the year we've had several small events, where we've had a committee, a 100th Planning Committee we called it, and that committee came together and they actually came up with ideas to celebrate. A lot of times they did little fundraisers, like car washes, bake sales, they developed a cookbook that we sold, they've done a brick sale where people could buy a brick and have it etched, whatever you would like in there, so throughout the year they've done probably about one a month I would guess, and this group took charge and developed those small items. And in the process they've raised $25,000 to go towards a therapeutic garden for the patients. I'd like to just congratulate the committee, they did a fabulous job, and they're well deserved of this award.