New Baystate Franklin doctors explore rural health needs on county tour

The six newest doctors in Baystate Franklin Medical Center’s Family Medicine Residency Program embarked on a tour of Franklin County on Friday to learn about the challenges the rural region faces and the community organizations that are helping to combat them.

The six doctors, who recently started their residency at the Greenfield hospital, joined the Franklin Regional Council of Governments for an afternoon discussing senior services, efforts to curb food insecurity and a lack of primary care physicians, among other topics.

“Part of what we’re doing is that most [of these] folks are not from Franklin County,” explained FRCOG’s Director of Community Health Phoebe Walker. “This is our fifth year doing this [tour]. Every year we go to different places, [and] we’ll stop and try to meet at least one other doctor.”

The doctor that the family medicine residents were introduced to this year was Dr. Stefan Topolski, who practices family medicine at Trailside Health in Shelburne Falls. The only primary care physician in western Franklin County, he’s been a practicing doctor for 30 years and has spent the last 26 in Franklin County.

“I am the smallest piece in the safety net,” Topolski said. “When a patient requires a lot of resources, if they’re quadriplegic, if they have advancing ALS and they need paperwork, paperwork, paperwork day in and day out, and they need things to be authorized and refilled … we will have them go to Baystate Franklin.”

According to Dr. Nathan Macedo, associate program director of the Family Medicine Residency Program, the bus tour with FRCOG is the highlight of orientation.

He said it was helpful for the young doctors to learn how far away many of the hilltowns are from Baystate Franklin in the county seat of Greenfield. They also learn how much community health care happens outside of the four walls of the clinic.

“It’s a wonderful place to live and work,” Macedo said.

One of the stops on the tour was the Shelburne Falls Senior Center, where Director Juli Moreno explained the intricacies of life in Franklin County.

“When you’re here and practicing, you’re part of the community,” Moreno told the young doctors. “The uniqueness of this center, as big as it is, is really about connecting people and having a place to go. We do a lot with our caregiver dementia program — many more folks every year are being diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s. So, we have a very strong caregiver program.”

Moreno went on to say that when living in a place like Franklin County, or more specifically western Franklin County, “there are services, but not at the drop of a hat.” What the services rely on, she said, are the scores of volunteers who are able to address shortcomings.

At the First Congregational Church of Ashfield, a similar message and sentiment was voiced by Patricia Thayer, president of the board at the Hilltown Churches Food Pantry.

At this food pantry, Thayer said, there are no income requirements.

“On Monday afternoon, from 1 to 3 or 4, we pack bags for between 50 and 60 families that live in the surrounding towns that can’t get into the distribution here on Tuesday afternoons,” Thayer said. “We pack the food, and they get a bag of dry food, of produce, of dairy, a bag of meat. … I’d say the average family gets between 60 and 90 pounds of food delivered to their house.”

While the Hilltown Churches Food Pantry is a food pantry first and foremost, other services are offered, too.

“We regularly get people who come in and need questions answered from the nurse, you know, questions about health care, questions about medication,” Trish Kittredge of the Hilltown Churches Food Pantry said. “It would be great to have somebody able to help people processing [their] health insurance, which is such a quagmire some of these people have.”

“We try to bring as many services as we can to one place,” Thayer added.

As the newest members of Baystate Franklin learned throughout their tour, Franklin County is unlike other areas of the state.

“I worked in Springfield for 30 years. When I came here, I was struck by a whole lot of things, and that’s what I wanted to share,” Moreno said at the Senior Center. “What we do up here … along with wellness, we have meals, we have education. … A lot for folks up here is centered on wellness, so they can be independent and stay at home.”