Page 4 - Healthcare News May/June 2022

A Tradition of Caring Lives On
Palliative Care Unit at Mercy Will Bear Andy Yee’s Name
SBy George O’Brien
arah Yee recalls that, during her husband’s final stay at Mercy Medical Center before he succumbed to cancer — a week in the in-
tensive care unit in late May 2021 — there was some subtle “bending of the rules,” as she called it.
Most of it involved visitation, and, more specifi- cally, the number of people who could visit and the hours when people could drop in, she noted. But there was more to it, especially efforts to make his room more like home, she said, adding that steps involved everything from the music playing — Earth Wind & Fire — to the Disney movies he would watch with family members, to pictures of family and friends that were brought in and placed around the room.
Summing it all up, Yee said that it wasn’t long before she called for an ambulance to bring Andy to Mercy for that final stay, that she decided that she didn’t want him to die at home.
“We love our house and the memories that we made here ... but I didn’t want these to be our last memories of him,” she said, adding quickly that she did want him to die in a setting that was as close to home as she and family members could make it.
“We love our house and the memories that we made here ... but I didn’t want these to be our last memories of him.”
And the desire to enable others to enjoy that same home-like setting has prompted members of the
Yee family, working in concert with those at Mercy Medical Center, to conceptualize the Andy Yee Pal- liative Care Unit, which is slated to open its doors before the end of this year.
Eight rooms are planned in space on the fifth floor of the hospital that had been a med-surg unit. Plans call for those private rooms, family respite places, private meeting rooms, and an outdoor terrace.
“This will be a specialized unit with specialized care,” said Deborah Bitsoli, president of Mercy Medical Center. “The rooms will have a particular color scheme, there will be a garden for the families, there will be particular types of furniture so the pa- tients can stay overnight, and we will also outfit the rooms so some of the hospital equipment is behind walls, so that the environment would almost be like a home setting.
“The ICU is very institutional-looking,” she went on. “These rooms will not be institutional-looking; they’re going to look like a family room; this will be a very unique model for Springfield.”
The center will take the name of a man known for his many business accomplishments — he was a seri-
Gov. Charlie Baker, Sarah Yee, center, and Mercy Medical Center President Deborah Bitsoli at last month’s announce- ment of plans for the Andy Yee Pal- liative Care Unit
al entrepreneur known in recent years for partnering with Peter Picknelly and others to save the Student Prince restaurant and then the landmark White Hut eatery — but also for his philanthropy.
At an elaborate press conference to announce the creation of the palliative care unit, staged last month in Mercy’s courtyard, several speakers, including Gov. Charlie Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, both of whom became friends with Yee in recent years, talked about how the facility would not only meet
a need, but speak — and in dramatic fashion — to Yee’s passion for giving back.
Indeed, before talking about the new unit, what
it would offer, and what it would mean for patients and their families, Bitsoli set the tone by first turning back the clock to the early weeks of the pandemic, when Yee arranged to bring a Peter Pan bus full of food for staff at the hospital.
“There was another time when I called Andy and said, ‘I need your help,’ and he immediately said
4 WWW.HEALTHCARENEWS.COM MAY/JUNE 2022