Over 100 years of caring traced back to our roots

Visiting Nurse & Hospice Home is a community-based, non-profit agency that has operated in Fort Wayne for over 100 years.

The roots of Visiting Nurse & Hospice Home can be traced to 1888 when the Ladies’ Relief Union distributed food to the area’s needy. Two years later the Union expanded and formed the Visiting Nurse Committee to bring food to the ill.

In 1900, the program, now renamed the Visiting Nurse League, hired its first nurse, Josephine Shatzer, who worked largely alone for the next 23 years. Being paid just $10 per week throughout her career, she certainly didn't take the job for the money.

In 1922, the League began to receive support from the Community Chest, the predecessor of today’s United Way of Allen County. In 1935 nearly 60 percent of its funding came from the Community Chest; that figure today is 3.5 percent.

The 1930s saw the League working in conjunction with the Allen County and Red Cross Nursing Services under shared supervision. The groups disbanded their relationship in 1942, reunited again for a time under the name “Public Health Nursing Service of Fort Wayne and Allen County,” and then parted ways again. The League formally changed its name to the Visiting Nurse Service in 1954. The first “housekeeping aides,” later known as home health aides, began visiting patients in 1958.

Competition from other agencies began to affect the Visiting Nurse Service as early as 1979. The first strategic planning for the Visiting Nurse Service occurred in 1982, when goals were set to increase referrals, visits and productivity, and to decrease visit costs.

In 1983, in response to shorter inpatient stays, hospitals entered the home health care field. Ultimately, Parkview and Lutheran merged their hospice programs with Visiting Nurse Service under the new agency Visiting Nurse Service and Hospice.

The next decade was fraught with change and saw the dissolution of the Parkview-Lutheran-VNSH partnership. Visiting Nurse Service and Hospice reverted to being a freestanding, community-based agency without formal ties to either hospital.

Still, such was the demand for their service that the agency expanded into Adams, Wells and Huntington counties. In 1995, following a nearly three-year feasibility study, Hospice Home of Northeast Indiana opened on the eighth floor of the former Lutheran Hospital on Fairfield Avenue. Hospice Home was devoted to patients who were unable to remain in their homes, and was the only in-patient facility dedicated solely to hospice care in the region, and one of only five in the entire state.

In 1998 Visiting Nurse Service and Hospice refocused its mission to exclusively provide end-of-life care. The board sold the traditional home health care program to St. Joseph Hospital and, at the same time, closed the private duty program.

In 2001, Hospice Home as a free-standing facility became a reality. A capital campaign raised $2 million to construct a new building on Homestead Road, where the VNHH offices and 11-bed Hospice Home are now located.

In 2006, Visiting Nurse & Hospice Home expanded the Hospice Home, adding three patient rooms (for a total of 14) a larger family room and conference room, and team work space.  

Today, the future appears bright for Visiting Nurse & Hospice Home (as the agency was renamed in 2004). VNHH continues to provide hospice care in patients’ residences (including nursing homes) or in its Hospice Home. The only remaining home care is through the Oncology/Palliative Care program for patients with terminal illnesses who are still receiving curative treatments.