In Carney Hospital’s final weeks, nurse Mary Ann Rockett saw sick patient after sick patient come to the emergency room for help.
“We've had cardiac arrest, stroke, violent psychiatric patients,” she said. “We've seen patients in unbelievably bad medical condition.”
Carney Hospital is set to close permanently on Saturday morning, after serving generations of patients in and around Boston’s biggest and most diverse neighborhood. Rockett wonders: How will these patients get the care they need when their neighborhood hospital is gone?
Many people in and around Dorchester lack easy access to transportation. And even if they get themselves to another hospital, they’re likely to face wait times in other crowded ERs.
“I don't know how the other hospitals are going to cope,” Rockett said.
The closure is the latest messy chapter in the Steward Health Care story. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May after failing to pay its bills and piling up billions of dollars in debt. It put all its hospitals up for sale as part of the bankruptcy restructuring process. But Steward officials said they received no viable offers for Carney or Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, and decided to close both.
“I don't know what stage I'm in: Anger? Denial? But I know what stage I will not get to, and that's acceptance,” Boston City Councilor John FitzGerald said at a public hearing earlier this month.
“Carney Hospital saved my mother,” said another speaker, resident Clifton Braithwaite. “She has dementia. Carney was there for me, and they helped me walk my mother through a tough time.”
Health care workers’ unions, local politicians and other community members have rallied for weeks to try to stop the hospital closures, without success. Now, they’re having to say a painful goodbye.
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Beth Reid, an imaging technologist at Nashoba Valley, spoke at a public hearing about the future of that hospital. She said patients have been in her office crying because they don’t know where they will go for care in the future.
“This is just an unbelievable nightmare,” Reid said. “I can't believe that this is actually happening. And our poor patients are the ones that will suffer.”
Without the Ayer hospital as an option, patients in this rural part of the state will have to travel many miles farther to hospitals in Leominster, Concord and other communities. Dr. Amjad Husain said that additional travel time could be the difference between a life saved, and a life lost.
He’s most concerned about patients suffering heart attacks, strokes and major bleeding – because speed is essential.
“There's going to be people who will be dying because of these decisions, because they won't get care fast enough,” said Husain, a critical care and lung specialist at Nashoba Valley. “Absolutely, there will be bad outcomes.”
Husain has been treating patients in the Nashoba Valley for 20 years.
“It really is terrible,” he said of the hospital’s closure, his voice breaking with emotion. “We do good work here. We do it better than most.”
In Ayer, and in Dorchester, there’s a palpable sense of anger and grief about the loss of a critical community resource.
“We can put all of the extra planning into place,” said Michael Kushmerek, a state representative from Fitchburg, a few miles from Nashoba Valley Medical Center, “but at the end of the day, the seniors in our community, the poor, the most disadvantaged, are the ones that lose access to health care.”
Steward officials said Friday they will station ambulances outside both Carney and Nashoba Valley for seven days after the hospitals close, at 7 a.m. Saturday. That’s after a court-appointed patient safety advocate recommended the measure this week, to help people in crisis who may show up at the Carney or Nashoba emergency rooms, unaware that the hospitals have closed.
State officials have required Steward to file detailed plans ensuring local patients have access to medical care after this weekend. They said the Department of Public Health’s Incident Command Center is also closely monitoring the impacts of the closures, and is working with local health care leaders and emergency medical services providers to make sure patients receive the care they need.
The administration said it would provide assistance for certain cities and towns to upgrade ambulances and emergency equipment.
UMass Memorial Health is considering options including converting the Nashoba Valley emergency department into an urgent care center, administration officials said.
“We’ve heard the concerns raised by the communities and staff impacted by Steward’s plans to close Carney Hospital and Nashoba Valley Medical Center. We share their frustration,” Gov. Maura Healey said in a statement Friday. “Our teams have been preparing for this, and we will ensure that residents continue to have access to high-quality medical care and that all staff is connected to new employment opportunities at other facilities.”
Opponents of the hospital closures have repeatedly called on Healey to prevent the hospitals from shutting down completely. But Healey has said there’s nothing she can do because no qualified hospital operator was willing to take over Carney or Nashoba Valley in the long term.
“That’s why those hospitals are set to close,” she recently told reporters. “It’s because of Steward, because [of] what Steward did in running them to the ground.”
Instead, her administration is focused on trying to save five other Steward hospitals that local, nonprofit owners are willing to buy.
This week, deals were finalized for four of those hospitals, as well as the transfer of operations for a fifth hospital. The Rhode Island-based Lifespan system will buy St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River and Morton Hospital in Taunton for $175 million. Lawrence General Hospital will take over Holy Family Hospital, which has campuses in Methuen and Haverhill, for $28 million.
Meanwhile, Boston Medical Center negotiated an agreement to take over Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton and the operations of St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton.
The Healey administration plans to seize the real estate of St. Elizabeth’s by eminent domain and transition the property to the new operator. Apollo Global Management, the investment firm that controls the property, has vowed to fight the state’s decision.
At a rally in support of Carney and Nashoba Valley at the State House this week, Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said residents of Ayer and Dorchester want the state to take the same actions there.
“To protect our patients, to ease the burden on our EMS and our paramedics, to protect good jobs in our city,” she said. “We are asking for the bare minimum.”
