For many with chronic illnesses and severe health conditions, they have no choice but to travel for specialized care.

The cost of such care, along with hotels, gas, and meals can be crippling, and even mean that people don’t get the care that they need.

What You Need To Know

  • For many with chronic illnesses and severe health conditions, they have no choice but to travel for specialized care.

  • The cost of such care, along with hotels, gas and meals can be crippling, and even mean that people don’t get the care that they need

  • Health care hospitality facilities like Sarah’s Guest House in Syracuse run on volunteers and work to ease that burden

Health care hospitality facilities like Sarah’s Guest House in Syracuse, where multiple hospitals provide care to those around Central New York and beyond, look to ease that burden.

“We’re the only adult healthcare hospitality home in the area,” said executive director David Haas. “We lodge patients and loved ones of patients who come to Syracuse for health care.”

The goal is to remove financial barriers for people in need of that specialized care but can only get it by traveling to Central New York.

“They get their bedroom, all the comforts of home, food, and a ride to and from the hospital,” he said. “All of the food here in this kitchen is for them.”

Guests are asked, but not required, to make a $ 25-a-night donation, and with that comes the things Haas has mentioned, along with common areas that remind guests they are not alone.

“Everybody who’s staying with us is going through a common experience of some sort of health care crisis and is coming to us at one of the hardest times in their life,” he said. “There is a lot of bonding happening”

Upstairs, bedrooms provide comfort and supplies during these challenging times.

“Let us handle all of that, you just take care of yourself,” Haas said.

He emphasizes that the entire operation is made possible by volunteers like Julie May, who clean, cook meals, drive patients and their families to appointments and do landscaping work.

“We all have a time in our life when we need support, and we have to have people to reach out and help people that are at a really low point in their life,” she said. “I just think it’s really important to do for people.”

Haas says for some, all of this means getting the care they need, when failure to do so is not an option.

“We know from talking with our people that if we weren’t here, a large number of them would not be able to come to our town to get the health care that they need,” he said.

If you’re looking for a way to pitch in, Sarah’s Guest House is looking for volunteers to do many of the things mention above. If interested, you can learn more by reaching out to them directly.