Good Shepherd Hospice is a non-profit organization that was created in 2001 with the merger of Good Samaritan, St. Charles and Mercy Hospices and represents a combined thirty years of experience serving the community. It’s mission is to expand and enhance healthcare at the end-of-life for all individuals and their families living throughout Long Island, while educating the community on the philosophy and concept of hospice services. The hospice mission also seeks to educate and promote the necessity for earlier referrals to a hospice so the patient and family have the ability to make informed decisions regarding care. Through its Community Outreach programs Good Shepherd Hospice continues to educate the community and professionals in an attempt to eliminate barriers to hospice care and develop linkages in the community supporting the mission.

Good Shepherd Hospice employs close to 225 staff members and has a volunteer core of close to three hundred. Currently the staff and volunteers are caring for up to 400 patients and their families each day.

The close of 2005 represents five-full years of operations for Good Shepherd Hospice serving the residents of Nassau and Suffolk Counties facing the issues and crisis at end of life. During these five years we have successfully merged three different cultures into one cohesive program. The original goal, to consolidate what we can to achieve a broader base of care, and thus expand the mission of Hospice within Catholic Health Services of Long Island, has been achieved. Since the beginning in January of 2001 we have walked with 13,922 individuals and their families through life’s most difficult journey. Where alone we may have provided less than 200,000 days of care in our final separate years, together over the past five years we have provided 615,177 days of care at the end of life.