As state officials continue to encourage people to seek care at Steward Health Care’s eight hospitals in Massachusetts despite the company’s bankruptcy, a doctor from a neighboring hospital said the messaging doesn’t tell the whole story of what is actually happening on the ground. Since Steward filed for bankruptcy in Texas last week, Gov. Maura T. Healey and others have sought to make clear that the legal proceeding does not necessarily mean that anything has changed for patients, urging people to keep their appointments at Steward facilities and encouraging residents to seek emergency care at Steward hospitals without reservation. Public Health Commissioner Robbie Goldstein told the Public Health Council on Wednesday that the state’s “consistent message to patients in the community has been and continues to be that all Steward hospitals in Massachusetts remain open, patients should keep up with their health care needs, maintain their appointments, screenings and tests.”
But the chief of medical affairs at Lawrence General Hospital, which is near to Steward’s Holy Family Hospital in Methuen and Haverhill, told the council that underneath the state’s rhetoric “is a reality, which is that in spite of these hospitals remaining open, their level of intensity of care is clearly declining.”
“And that’s a message that is not really advertised, but it is real. For the ones that are next door to them, we can see that vital support services—not just having emergency room physicians and nurses, but you need to have orthopedics, neurosurgery, you need to have all of these other things to be able to care for these patients. So, what we are finding is that they get in, they get evaluated, but then they get transferred out.
