Our History

In 1888, The Washington Home for Incurables was founded by Mrs. Charles Hill, niece of philanthropist William Corcoran (originator of the Corcoran Gallery and co-founder of Riggs National Bank) to care for Washington DC’s poor, chronically ill people who had no where else to go.

    • From our beginning, we’ve been healthcare pioneers. We built larger facilities, expanded staff, added services and cared for more and more people. When Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, ours was the first facility in the District of Columbia to be certified for reimbursement.
    • We cared for cancer patients in the 1940’s when cancer was believed to be highly contagious.
    • In 1978, we admitted our first patient into our inpatient hospice unit – one of the first in the country and the only one in the District – to comfort people in the final stages of their lives.
    • We began offering home hospice care in 1986 and, in 2001, we acquired Medstar Health’s Visiting Nurse Association’s hospice program and began providing home hospice care to residents of the District, Maryland and Virginia.
    • After 113 years of service, in 2001, The Washington Home for Incurables adopted a new name: The Washington Home & Community Hospices.
    • In 2015, The Washington Home & Community Hospices’ Board of Directors reached the decision to sell our Northwest DC property by the end of 2016 in order to serve more residents in the metropolitan area in their own homes.
    • By December 16, 2016, we phased out our long-term residential nursing home and rehabilitation programs and expanded our hospice care to service more of our community in Washington, DC and Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland.
    • In 2019, we transferred both in-home and in-patient hospice services to Capital Caring Health.
    • And finally, in 2020, we transitioned to foundation status and began our impact giving with dedicated large grants for two major initiatives.
    • Following several years of grantmaking, 2024 began our first year of our open-call grant application process to expand our partnerships and impact across all Wards in the Washington, D.C. area.