Carney Hospital and Nashoba Valley Medical Center, which are set to close in less than two weeks, each provide an “essential service necessary for preserving access and health status” in their areas, public health regulators concluded this week.
The Department of Public Health found after an abbreviated review that the Steward Health Care-owned facilities both offer “essential service,” a determination that provided more ammunition to lawmakers and advocates who want state government to intervene and prevent the hospitals from shuttering around the end of the month.
However, state public health officials stressed that their determination does not give the department the power to order either hospital to remain open. Instead, DPH called on Steward — which is trying to offload all of its Massachusetts hospitals amid bankruptcy proceedings — to take a slew of additional steps to ease the transitions.
Stephen Davis, director of DPH’s division of health care facility licensure and certification, wrote a seven-page memo Monday outlining more than a dozen concerns about potential gaps in Steward’s closure plan for Carney.
He urged Steward to provide more information to regulators, patients and providers about the location of alternative services, transportation options to get to health care after the closure, access to medical records, ambulance run times and more.
Based on testimony received at public hearings, Davis wrote, DPH is “concerned that the plan lacks detail as to what, how, and when current patients will receive information about options for care available to them, what resources are and will be available to patients to ensure the patients are able to navigate the change and answer any care continuity questions.”
Davis followed that up with a similar Nashoba-focused letter on Tuesday, in which he also described concerns about a lack of details provided by Steward and called on the system to submit a plan for maintaining access to…