Photo: City of Lawrence
LAWRENCE, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — Lawrence General Hospital's CEO is opening up about the hospital's acquisition of the Holy Family Hospital campuses in Methuen and Haverhill.
The two community hospitals in the Merrimack Valley were on the verge of closure due to the Steward Health Care bankruptcy.
“It was very clear to me that closure of these hospitals would be disastrous for patients and organizations,” Dr. Abha Agrawal said in a webinar on Thursday with the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association.
Dr. Agrawal took over as CEO of Lawrence General earlier this year. Shortly after her arrival, she said she started hearing about the hospital closures surrounding Steward Health Care's bankruptcy.
The potential influx of patients was a significant concern. Dr. Agrawal said Lawrence General has about 65 thousand emergency room visits a year. Holy Family in Methuen has around 45 thousand emergency visits a year, while its location in Haverhill has around 25 thousand visits.
“No campus has the physical capacity or work force capacity to absorb all of it,” she said. That potential impact inside the emergency room alone was enough for Dr. Agrawal to act.
The Holy Family Hospital in Methuen is 1.6 miles away for Lawrence General and Haverhill is 6.8 miles away. Less than ten miles apart, Dr. Agrawal said “we could not stand by and say it’s not our problem.”
Simply absorbing the two hospital campuses would be too much. That’s why Dr. Agrawal introduced a new regional healthcare system instead, adding that it is essential to keep the hospital under local control to keep “care that is rooted in the community for the community.”
Dr. Agrawal said, as she walked through the hospitals and talked with her new employees, she saw firsthand that Steward had been depleting these facilities of any resources for personal profit.
“I see how dedicated the staff [at the hospitals] are but how poorly maintained [they were] from an equipment perspective,” she said.
The main priority right now, according to Dr. Agrawal, is making "these facilities safe and optimally equipped for clinical care."
Dr. Agarwal said she is optimistic about the future of this new system, and it’s only the beginning of a new chapter.
"It’s going to be a long road ahead, it’s going to be a tremendous amount of work, but we are driven by this vision of creating a system of scale and stability for the next generation to come."
WBZ NewsRadio’s Nichole Davis (@NicholeDWBZ) reports.
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