Special Board of Aldermen Public Hearing — 5/17/2018 Page 4
Chairman Dowd
We are going department by department. Which is the..?
Tina Andrade
The appropriations to non-profit organizations.
Chairman Dowd
It has come up, 109? So you can provide comments. Please
identify yourself and address, for the record.
Tina Andrade
Certainly, Iam Tina Andrade, I live as 12 Mount Laurels Drive in
Nashua and I am here representing Home Health & Hospice. Iam
here because we had just gotten the information that we have been
in the budget appropriated of a little over $26,000.00. Home
Health & Hospice care is a Visiting Nurse Association and
Hospice and we were founded in Nashua in 1883. Of course, we
are a non-profit organization. We visit people in their homes and
care for them and in the community hospice house.
Our grant proposal was for $40,000.00. Last year, we received a
little over $38,000.00 and we were very grateful for that. Because
we are a non-profit organization, our mission is to care for people
whatever their financial circumstance is. It is a challenge, but we
have always had the cooperation of the community so that we
were able to do that. We work very hard to raise the funds so that
we can take care of folks that have fallen through the insurance
cracks.
Our proposal was to care for the indigent residents of Nashua. I
have worked for the organization for 14 years and on the first day
that I took the job, I opened a note that had come to me from the
family member of a patient and it said, “you are our angels at a
time in our lives when we needed you the most”. And I never
forgot that and the note is still on my desk and I have since then
literally hundreds of notes like that.
So the appropriation, which we are very grateful for, and we were
very grateful last year to get the funds that we got, but we are
under tremendous constraints by government reimbursements.
And in fact, those reimbursements don’t really pay for the care
that we are giving folks. When we take indigent residents of
Nashua there is no money for them so it is all from fund raising
that we can actually take these patients.
Now the other thing that I think is important to note is that for-
profit health care organizations that take care of folks in the home
setting, pick and choose the patients that they will care for. We
