Photo | MATT WRIGHT
Dr. Eric Dickson, president & CEO at UMass Memorial Health
August 26, 2024
UMass Memorial preliminarily considering converting Nashoba Valley hospital ER into urgent care
Photo | Mica Kanner-Mascolo
Hospital workers, state representatives, and community members protested Nashoba Valley Medical Center's closure at a Massachusetts Department of Public Health public hearing in Devens on Aug. 15.
As Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer is set to close Saturday, Worcester-based UMass Memorial Health is floating the idea of possibly converting the hospital’s emergency room into an urgent care facility, in an attempt to provide an alternative healthcare option for the Nashoba Valley region’s nearly 115,000 residents.
Any possible utilizations of the Nashoba Valley ER by UMass Memorial are in the hypothetical stage and are brainstormed in an effort to support region if the hospital does indeed close.
"We recognize the far-reaching impacts that the closure of any of Steward’s hospitals could have on patient access to essential services in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. While we do not have any plans to submit a bid for one of Steward Health Care’s hospitals, we are committed to working with the state to maintain access to high-quality, affordable health care services," UMass Memorial wrote in a statement.
Nashoba Valley’s closure will mean extended ER wait times at neighboring hospitals already pushing capacity as residents will be forced to seek emergency medical care at neighboring hospitals, namely UMass Memorial HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital’s Leominster campus and Emerson Hospital in Concord.
But the Leominster and Concord hospitals don’t have a surplus of capacity, said Dr. Eric Dickson, president and CEO of UMass Memorial Health, which is the parent organization for HealthAlliance and the largest hospital system in Central Massachusetts.
In fact, he said HealthAlliance’s Leominster campus is one of the area’s most overwhelmed hospitals and twice as busy as Nashoba Valley.
Knowing these longer wait times will result in poorer patient outcomes, Dickson has expressed interest in partnering with state officials to convert Nashoba Valley’s soon-to-be empty emergency room into an urgent care or a skilled nursing facility to help mitigate those risks, though there are no set plans in place. Dickson said he hopes to work with the state on the possibility in the future.
UMass Memorial is working on contingency plans which can be enacted in the present to help prepare its Leominster hospital for Nashoba Valley’s closure, but Dickson said nothing will be at the scale of replacing what Nashoba Valley provides.
“I haven’t seen a plan yet that says, ‘Everything will be okay. It will function normally.’ Basically, we're going to do the best we can with what we have to work with,” he said. “This isn't going to be fixed in a day or two. This is going to have to be an intense recruitment effort to staff up and really then look at every area, every nook and cranny that we have to be able to take care of patients. The emergency departments will be busier. The waits to be seen will be longer. The hospital will be more crowded.”
The plan to close Nashoba Valley on Saturday has been part of the bankruptcy filed by its parent company, Texas-based Steward Health Care. Steward is expected to sign purchase agreements for the company’s six remaining Massachusetts hospitals put up for auction Tuesday, deals that would cost the state’s taxpayers up to $700 million by 2027, according to a Saturday report by The Boston Globe.
Mica Kanner-Mascolo is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the healthcare and diversity, equity, and inclusion industries.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article has been updated to make clear that UMass Memorial's possible plans are preliminary and would be the provider's efforts to support the community if and when the hospital closes.
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Anonymous
August 26, 2024
We need our hospital.
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