About two years ago, the nurses who work at Baystate Franklin Medical Center, in the final stages of a 29-month contract negotiation, warned about signs the Greenfield hospital’s parent company might be planning to hollow it out.
They raised concerns that Baystate Health might shift services to Springfield. But the nurses eventually signed a contract and the warnings, which hospital administrators vehemently rejected, stopped. Afterward, the hospital went out of its way to demonstrate Baystate’s commitment to Franklin County.
Then Baystate Franklin President Steven Bradley proposed creating a community advisory group for the hospital, to serve as a formal “pathway for the community to have input into the future of the hospital.” He said Baystate planned to grow the local hospital, bringing physician services from Springfield to Greenfield, not the reverse.
“The hospital is owned by the community,” Bradley said. “It’s run by Baystate Health, but it’s been here for over 100 years. It’s a nonprofit, charitable organization dedicated to caring for the health care needs of the greater Franklin County region.”
Since then, Bradley has left the hospital and Dr. Thomas Higgins, the hospital’s respected chief of staff, for nearly a year served as the interim president. This left many community leaders worried and wondering whether Baystate would replace him with another full-time president or try to run the hospital by remote control.
In May, Cindy Russo, the former vice president of operations for the central region at Hartford HealthCare, took Baystate Franklin’s reins as its latest president, which we take as confirmation that the brass at Baystate Health do understand the value of a community hospital led by people on the ground.
Fast-forward to Monday, and Baystate Franklin patients were being treated in a new $26 million surgical suite. No small investment by the community and the hospital’s parent company. The new 55,000-square-foot wing has four state-of-the-art surgical suites. One is 500 square feet, two are 650 square feet, and the fourth is 750 square feet. The average size of the former operating rooms was 450 square feet. The larger rooms house large pieces of medical equipment necessary for modern, complex surgical procedures, and one of the rooms is also lead-lined to accommodate today’s advanced technologies and more intricate procedures, as well as future surgical technologies.
“Creating state-of-the-art surgical space to keep care local and attract new physician talent to the area, and provide more comfortable, private patient-care areas, have been the driving themes behind this project from the start,” the hospital’s leaders said as the new wing opened. “These goals are shared by Baystate Franklin and its parent health care system, Baystate Health.”
We tend to be skeptical around here, but this is another satisfying sign that our local hospital is strong, building for the future, and that Baystate Health is banking on the important role the Franklin plays, and will play, in delivery of the region’s health care. We hope this means that as demand for medical services grows as predicted, our local hospital will continue to grow to meet our needs, right here.