I write today with a heavy heart and a sense of urgency on the proposed closure of Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer and what this means for the 16 towns in the Nashoba Associated Boards of Health (NABH) service area.
In case you aren’t familiar with our agency, NABH provides regional public health services to our towns in partnership with their local Boards of Health. We are appreciative of Massachusetts Department of Public Health Commissioner Robbie Goldstein’s meeting with a number of local officials and emergency medical service providers on July 29. We know that these entities share many of the same concerns we do: increased EMS response times, increased travel time to hospitals on the outskirts of our health district, and an unsustainable burden upon other hospitals and emergency rooms that already experience strained capacity, among other considerations. The situation continues to unfold in real time, and we are paying close attention because we know the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Focusing on emergency services alone, the closure will not only extend travel times but could result in delays that mean the difference between life and death. An average of 16,000 patients make their way through the NVMC Emergency Department each year and will need to be absorbed by other already overwhelmed ERs. That’s a troubling statistic in and of itself.
As your friendly neighborhood public health educator, I was fortunate to engage in a stroke awareness initiative in partnership with Nashoba Valley Medical Center last year. During this project, a local EMT shared his own story of having a severe stroke in a video for our social media campaign. He was rushed to NVMC where critical, timely, life-saving treatments began, allowing him to recover with no functional deficit. Without NVMC, his story would look very different.
We know that in the case of stroke, every minute counts; the acronym for stroke response is “FAST” (face, arms, speech, time) for a reason. An additional 20-plus minutes to an alternative hospital is an unacceptable risk for our residents. I want to acknowledge that the consequences of this closure will extend far beyond emergency services, into the local economy and infrastructure, and into routine and preventive health care access as well. It may be a small hospital, and it may be a for-profit hospital, but make no mistake—NVMC is a critical lifeline for our community.
‘Rapidly depleting’ access to health care
I am sick of watching essential health care services leave our state, and specifically our region, which was colloquially known as a “resource desert” when I joined Nashoba Associated Boards of Health three years ago. During my tenure, the region has continued to lose services and resources; it’s now looking more like a “resource wasteland.” In public health, we are supposed to work upstream to prevent conditions that result in poor health outcomes and disease. This is a tall order in a region of rapidly depleting essential services and resources. I would like to know what we can do to get ahead and stay ahead of this troubling trend. I recognize it’s a complex, multifaceted problem that is bigger than our region and our state, but we can’t sit idly by while the health care access scaffolding falls apart around us.
So, what does this mean for us at Nashoba? Short and probably long term, this means advocacy work and lots of it, including communications such as this op ed. We commit to doing our part to tackle the health care access problem in our region in partnership with state leadership, our local Boards of Health, and our communities. We are in contact with community leaders and elected officials and hope to collaborate to pick apart the multifaceted problem fueling this ongoing essential services exodus and work to address it. Our hearts are with our local emergency responders, health care providers, and partners upon whom this closure will have a more direct impact.
We ask our residents to help keep remaining health care resources as accessible as possible by being prepared for scheduled appointments, communicating any changes to your providers as soon as possible, and using appropriate levels of care (urgent care vs. emergency room vs. primary care). The Massachusetts Department of Public Health maintains a FAQ page that provides more detailed information at https://www.mass.gov/info-details/steward-health-care-patient-and-community-faqs.
If there is truly nothing that can be done to preserve NVMC’s services, we must at least prioritize this problem and keep the conversation going, and challenge state leadership to provide guidance on how our health district and others can be part of the solution.
Jenna Montgomery is a licensed independent social worker and a Nashoba Associated Boards of Health public health educator and communications specialist.
Editor’s note: This opinion piece was submitted to newspapers throughout central Massachusetts by the Nashoba Associated Boards of Health. While the Press does not typically publish unsolicited opinion pieces by third parties, we felt that because of the close affiliation of NABH and Harvard’s Board of Health, Montgomery’s column merited publication.
