New Hospice in L.A. Will Double Space for Dying AIDS Patients

It hardly looks like a place one goes to die.

Morning sun streams through the picture windows onto the new wood floors as workmen scurry throughout the two-story building, putting finishing touches of peach and light blue paint on the walls. A stained glass window depicting a sea shell is already in place, and a new living room rug suggestive of rippling water waits to be unrolled in front of the brick fireplace.

The cheerful setting, however, belies the reason for the homey rooms: to provide a place where AIDS patients can spend their final months of life.

The Chris Brownlie Hospice, named for a gay activist diagnosed as having AIDS who expects that he, too, will one day die there, is the largest of its kind in the county to offer 24-hour medical care. It will more than double the hospice beds now available in Los Angeles County, health officials say. Nearly 6,000 cases of AIDS have been diagnosed here.

The hospice, located in old nurses’ quarters at Barlow Hospital in Elysian Park, will open its doors today to the first of its patients. Its 25-bed unit is expected to serve 365 patients the first year.

Months of Work

The project is the result of months of work by the AIDS Hospice Foundation, a group of gay activists and health care workers. The foundation was organized in 1986 as Stop AIDS Quarantine to fight Proposition 64, the measure sponsored by Lyndon LaRouche that called for state reporting and quarantine of AIDS patients.

“We had no intention of going into the hospice businesses, but here we are,” said Brownlie, 38, who was watching last-minute preparations the other day.

He said the group initially was interested only in promoting AIDS health care. One of the foundation’s more vocal events was the the picketing last year of County Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s Glendale home, followed by public meetings to promote AIDS care.

Five days after the picketing, the supervisors--on a motion by Antonovich--voted to support the concept of hospice care. Several months later, after intense lobbying by AIDS activists, the county voted to spend $2 million on AIDS health care.

Barlow Hospital, which provides respiratory care for patients, approached the group with the idea of leasing its old nurses’ quarters for $1 a year.

Plans for 2 More

“We knew no one else would do it, so it had to be us,” Brownlie said. The foundation plans to build two other hospices with 25 beds each--one in South-Central Los Angeles and another on the Metropolitan State Hospital grounds in Norwalk.

The $1.3 million in start-up money for the Brownlie hospice was obtained from several sources, including $250,000 from the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, $400,000 from the county, $325,000 from a state-sponsored hospice fund and $350,000 in private donations, including $200,000 from Gene La Pietra, owner of the Circus Disco in West Hollywood. Since then a half-dozen corporations have donated smaller amounts. Patient reimbursements will provide most of the operating costs.

That the new hospice resembles a home is no accident. Large windows look out on the downtown cityscape and the trees of Elysian Park. “What they see in these rooms will be the entire world view for many of the patients,” Brownlie said.

Paul Gatto will direct a 32-member medical staff provided by Interhealth Home Health Care, a medical management agency. Forty volunteers will “be a friend” to patients and their families.

“Regretably, there are a great many people in need of this care,” said Joyce Green, board member, explaining that the hospice will be available only to patients in the last two months of life. They must be referred by their physicians, and priority will be given to those who have no other place to live or whose families are not able to care for them.

One of the benefits of such a hospice, health officials said, is that it is less costly than a regular hospital. There are a dozen facilities in the county with about 100 beds that offer residential care for AIDS patients. However, most are not true hospices and are not equipped to deal with terminally ill patients. The county is planning a 20-bed AIDS unit at County-USC Medical Center, which would include hospice space, but that is at least a year away from completion.

For years, Los Angeles--like other major cities, except San Francisco--has been criticized for the absence of AIDS hospices.

“The reality of how scarce AIDS patient care is in the county came home to me when I spent three days laying on a gurney at USC hospital in a ward designed to hold 24 patients, and into which 47 of us were crammed,” Brownlie said.

In the last two years he has been in and out of the hospital so many times that he has lost count. He had to give up his full-time work, which once included ownership of a greeting card and calendar design company. But he has continued to support the hospice effort.

The foundation’s board of directors spent a couple of months trying to come up with a name for the hospice. Then at one meeting, foundation President Michael Weinstein suggested Brownlie, “because he is a representative of those in the community who have the spirit, courage and grace to fight for those with AIDS.”

That he may one day have a room in the hospice that bears his name is both a comfort and a worry, Brownlie said.

“Of course, I’ve always hoped that I would not die, that I would live forever,” Brownlie says. “But on another level, I actually get a sense of well-being about this experience. Sometimes it becomes very profound in a religious sense at the edges of my consciousness. And this is what the hospice program is about. It will help others accept the fact that death, too, is part of the life experience.”