Every hospice will tell you it provides compassionate care. What separates one provider from another is whether that promise holds up at 3 a.m., in a living room, when a family is frightened and a nurse has to know exactly what to do.
St. Marie's Hospice was founded in 2012 around that standard. More than a decade later, we serve families across Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties from our office in Lathrup Village — and the measure of our work has not changed: whether the people in our care are comfortable, and whether their families feel supported rather than abandoned.
To provide skilled, dignified, and deeply human end-of-life care that allows patients to remain comfortable in the place they call home — and to support the families who love them, before and after loss.
That mission translates into a few specific operating commitments. We keep nurse caseloads at a level that permits real visits rather than rushed ones. We answer our on-call line with a registered nurse, not an answering service. We treat the family as part of the unit of care, not as visitors. And we continue to walk with families through bereavement support for a full year after a death, because grief does not resolve on a discharge date.
Mission statements are easy to write and hard to honor at scale. In hospice, the pressure points are predictable: the after-hours call that requires a nurse to drive out at midnight, the admission that comes in on a Friday evening, the family that needs a fourth conversation about the same decision. Our standard is that these are the job — not exceptions to it.
2012
St. Marie's Hospice was co-founded in 2012 in metro Detroit, at a point when families across the tri-county area had access to hospice services but not always to hospice care that felt personal. Larger regional providers offered scale. What was harder to find was a smaller, locally rooted team that knew the neighborhoods, the hospitals, the discharge planners, and the facilities by name.
The organization was built deliberately as a community-scale hospice: large enough to carry full Medicare certification and an interdisciplinary team, small enough that the executive director knows the caseload. That balance remains the operating philosophy today.
⚠️ CLIENT INPUT NEEDED — Founding narrative. I have not invented an origin story. To make this section genuinely strong (and E-E-A-T credible), please supply: (1) the co-founders’ names and roles, (2) the specific reason the hospice was started — a personal experience, a gap in the local market, a professional background, (3) the first year’s scale (first patients served, starting team size), (4) a 1–2 sentence quote from Mrs. Berkery. I will rewrite this section around the real story once you provide it.
2012
St. Marie's Hospice is co-founded in metro Detroit to serve families across the tri-county area.
2015
Achieves Medicare certification — the federal standard permitting reimbursement under the Medicare Hospice Benefit and requiring ongoing compliance surveys.
Ongoing
Earns and maintains CHAP (Community Health Accreditation Partner) accreditation, a voluntary review of clinical policies, records, and patient outcomes beyond the minimum regulatory floor.
Today
Serves 22+ communities across Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties from the Lathrup Village office, with 24/7 on-call nursing and a full interdisciplinary team.
Today
Holds a 4.9 out of 5 rating across 123 Google reviews, with comparable scores on BirdEye and Yelp.
Two of those milestones deserve a note, because families rarely know the difference.
Medicare certification is mandatory for any hospice billing Medicare — it is a floor, not a distinction. CHAP accreditation is voluntary. A hospice pursues it because it is willing to have its clinical practice reviewed by an outside body. When you are comparing providers, that distinction is worth asking about. More detail: Certifications & Accreditations.
Mrs. Melvie Berkery
St. Marie's Hospice is led by Executive Director Mrs. Melvie Berkery, who oversees clinical operations, staffing standards, and quality across the organization.
In hospice, leadership is not an abstraction. The executive director sets the caseload ceilings, decides how quickly an admission gets processed, approves the training budget, and determines whether after-hours coverage is adequately staffed or merely technically compliant. Those decisions are felt directly by families. They are the reason we publish our staff training and qualification standards openly rather than describing them in general terms.
⚠️ CLIENT INPUT NEEDED — Leadership bio. Please supply Mrs. Berkery’s credentials (RN? MSN? years in hospice? prior roles?) and, if available, brief bios for the Director of Nursing and Medical Director. A dedicated Leadership & Executive Team page should follow this one.
01
The most damaging myth in this field is that hospice means doing nothing. Managing advanced pain, breathlessness, agitation, and nausea at home is demanding clinical work. Our team adjusts medications proactively rather than reactively, and our nurses are trained to anticipate the next symptom rather than wait for the next call. See pain & symptom management.
02
A patient's comfort is inseparable from their family's capacity to cope. That is why social work, chaplaincy, volunteer support, respite, and bereavement services are core components of what we do — not optional extras. Explore family support and respite care.
03
Most of our patients are cared for at home, in a family member's home, or in a nursing or assisted living facility they already consider home. Avoiding an unnecessary final hospitalization is, for many families, the single most meaningful thing hospice accomplishes.
04
Families are making some of the hardest decisions of their lives, often with incomplete information. We would rather give a clear, difficult answer than a comfortable vague one — about prognosis, about what the Medicare Hospice Benefit does and does not cover, and about what the coming weeks may look like.
05
We serve patients regardless of race, religion, national origin, disability, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ability to pay. This is documented, not implied: see our nondiscrimination policy and patient rights.
From our Lathrup Village office, St. Marie's Hospice serves patients and families throughout Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties — including Detroit, Southfield, Livonia, Troy, Dearborn, Sterling Heights, and surrounding communities.
We work alongside area hospitals, physicians, discharge planners, nursing facilities, and assisted living communities. Clinicians and case managers can find referral criteria and contact details on our For Clinicians page.
The hospice industry has changed considerably since 2012. Roughly three-quarters of U.S. hospices are now for-profit, up from a small minority in 1990, and consolidation has made it harder for families to tell one provider from another. Research published in recent years has found measurable differences in family-reported experience depending on ownership structure — which is precisely why we encourage families to ask direct questions of any hospice they are considering, including ours.
What has not changed here is the standard we started with. A nurse who answers. A team that shows up. A family that is not left to figure it out alone. If you want to know how to evaluate that in any provider, we wrote a guide for it: How to Compare Hospice Providers in Detroit.