Editor’s note: Health care providers and patients in the 17 communities once served by the Nashoba Valley Medical Center continue to deal with its closure. To capture the personal impacts of the loss, the Harvard Press collaborated this fall with a class of Fitchburg State University students to sample the experiences of those most directly affected by the hospital’s shuttering. Here are four vignettes, chosen from among those submitted for publication and introduced by FSU senior Parker Stearns.
Health care is a cornerstone of any community, and the closure of a local hospital can have far-reaching consequences. On Aug. 31, 2024, Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, Massachusetts, shut its doors, leaving the communities of Devens, Shirley, Groton, Harvard, Littleton, Lunenburg, Pepperell, Westford, Leominster, and Townsend without a key health care provider. The hospital served a combined population of approximately 115,000 residents.
The hospital, owned by Steward Health Care, closed following the company’s filing for bankruptcy on May 6, 2024. While the reasons behind the bankruptcy are complex—with some pointing to corporate mismanagement—the impact on the community is undeniable. The closure has disrupted lives and contributed to the growing difficulty Massachusetts residents, especially in Worcester and Middlesex counties, face in accessing medical care.
In 2022, Nashoba Valley Medical Center reportedly provided services to 16,005 outpatients and performed 130,165 medical procedures. The hospital also recorded 1,874 inpatient discharges that year, illustrating the significant role it played in meeting the region’s health care needs.
The loss of health care services has rippled throughout the community. Residents now face increased wait times, longer travel distances for care, and, for vulnerable populations, heightened risks due to delayed access to urgent medical attention.
Beyond the statistics, the closure has left personal and professional challenges in its wake. Health care professionals have experienced job losses, patients are struggling to find alternative care, and families are grappling with the sudden lack of local medical services.
While discussions often focus on the corporate decisions and financial struggles of large health care systems, the real stories lie with the individuals living through the fallout. Patients, families, and medical workers are left to navigate the consequences of decisions made far beyond their control.
Parker Stearns is a senior majoring in game design at Fitchburg State University.
Shirley resident faces long waits and uncertainty
by Zoe Chrisostomides
The pain in her stomach became unbearable. After trying everything she could at home, Tennie Komar, a retiree in her 70s, drove herself to Nashoba Valley Medical Center around 6 p.m. When she arrived at the emergency room, doctors took her into care immediately. They soon discovered her gallbladder was inflamed, and she needed emergency surgery.
Because of its pending closure, the hospital was understaffed and unable to perform the surgery. Leominster medical officials were notified regarding Komar at 1 a.m. but were not able to transfer her until 4 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 16, 2024. Surgeons in Leominster completed the procedure, leaving Komar grateful yet fearful of the reality that this was the last time she could rely on Nashoba Valley.
For two decades, Komar has called Shirley home, relying on Nashoba Valley Medical Center—a quick 7-mile drive—as her primary emergency resource. Now, she’s uncertain where to turn for urgent care.
“If I have to go to the emergency room, I would imagine it to be a problem. I live alone so I’d drive myself. Now that Nashoba Valley Medical Center is closed, I honestly don’t know what I would do,” Komar said.
The hospital’s closure has significantly increased wait times at surrounding facilities such as Emerson Hospital, UMass Memorial Medical Center’s Leominster campus, and UMass Memorial Medical Center in Clinton. At the Leominster campus, the average wait time for emergency patients, as of late November, was 125 minutes, with average inpatient wait times exceeding eight hours. The UMass Memorial University campus reported average emergency wait times of 161 minutes and average inpatient waits more than seven hours, according to UMass Memorial Health Care Inc.
“You could get in and out of the Nashoba emergency room in 10 to 30 minutes; now we are looking at six to 12 hours,” Komar said.
Without Nashoba hospital, local seniors have limited options. Komar considers urgent care centers to be the most reliable option, though she notes their hours of operation are limited and so are the services they are licensed to provide. She holds on to hope that Nashoba will reopen, especially given the presence of nearby nursing homes.
“I’ve been horrified. What if something happens again to me, and I cannot get to a hospital in time?” she said.
The closure of Nashoba Valley Medical Center has left Komar and countless other residents of Shirley and surrounding towns without the accessible emergency care they’ve depended on for years. For elderly residents, especially those living alone, the increased distance and delays in receiving critical medical attention raise serious concerns.
Komar’s experience underscores a shared fear among local seniors, wondering where they can now turn in an emergency and whether timely care will be within reach.
Zoe Chrisostomides is a senior majoring in business administration and journalism at Fitchburg State University.
Heywood Hospital leader grapples with workforce shortages and scheduling of employees
by Alizabeth Yang
As health care systems nationwide grapple with staffing shortages, Sarah Hooper of Heywood Hospital in Gardener paints a stark picture of the growing crisis in the Nashoba Valley. The closure of Nashoba Valley Medical Center marks a grim turning point for the region, leaving employees without jobs and forcing them to struggle to survive.
Hooper is a clinical practice leader for Heywood Hospital, overseeing operations, staffing, and patient care within the Heywood health care system. With the closing of Nashoba Valley amid workforce shortages, she plays a vital role in facilitating patient transitions, reallocating resources, and maintaining quality care. Patients, residents, and former employees from Nashoba seeking employment now face a 30- to 40-minute drive to Heywood.
“It’s definitely a detriment to our whole area in Massachusetts,” Hooper said. “Taking that resource away from people is horrible. … It’s impossible to provide health care without the funding to support it, and not every patient has health insurance. Hospitals do have a requirement to be able to treat patients whether they have insurance or not when they have urgent needs, so decisions have to be made.”
Since the closure, Hooper has noticed changes in workload and scheduling. There has been an increase of patients recently, she said. “Even prior to Nashoba’s closing, Leominster closed their maternity ward, so we noticed a little bit of an influx from that. And then with Nashoba closing, we’re definitely seeing a lot more patients come through. … Our hospitals in Central Mass are full all the time, and we have people waiting for beds constantly. We are seeing more types of surgeries. … We’re also noticing, when we have patients who may require a high level of care, that we’re not able to send them anywhere.”
Hiring former Nashoba employees has been challenging due to the demands of the job. Unfortunately, to be an operating room nurse, “you need to be able to be on call on a regular basis weekly, and we have a 30-minute response time,” Hooper explained. “If you don’t live within 30 minutes, you’re spending the night at the hospital once a week. It’s challenging to find staff sometimes for this remote area. … I do feel like a lot of those [former NVMC] nurses are left in the cold because it’s just not feasible to drive that far.”
Both Nashoba and Heywood serve in isolated environments. With the increase of patients at Heywood, staff are on call at least once a week And once a patient is discharged, another admitted patient comes in, so staff members are constantly working.
“The on-call requirement—that you would stay after your shift or get called in, in the middle of the night—is increasing,” Hooper said. “Which I guess would mean a negative impact on this hospital, to pay overtime to the people who are on call. We have noticed an increase in [overtime] to cover the increase of cases that come through. … whether that’s just the community as a whole getting bigger, or the combination of the community and [the closure of] Nashoba.”
As rural health care systems continue to face challenges like staffing shortages and the closure of key facilities such as Nashoba Valley, the future of health care in Central Massachusetts looks uncertain. Hooper’s experience at Heywood Hospital highlights the growing pressure on health care workers as more patients seek care.
Alizabeth Yang is a junior majoring in business administration at Fitchburg State University.
COA director: Closing challenges provision of services to Harvard senior citizens
by Ahna Gainey
Debbie Thompson works hard to take care of the senior citizens of Harvard. But with the recent closing of the Nashoba Valley Medical Center, new challenges have made that task more difficult. Thompson is the director of the Council on Aging in Harvard. The council identifies the struggles and needs seniors in the community face and makes plans to assist them. As the director, Thompson leads the charge to provide the senior community with the best life possible.
One of the services the COA provides is van transportation. The hospital’s closing has led to a longer commute, since the vans now have to travel to hospitals in Concord, Clinton, or farther. This longer commute impacts the COA vans and the vehicles of senior citizens. “If you’re transporting them farther, it’s costing more in gas and, you know, either wear and tear on their own car, if they’re driving, or on our vans, if we’re taking them,” Thompson said. In addition to the transportation troubles, the COA has also now had to take extra time to help many of the seniors fill out forms and paperwork to transfer them to other hospitals. The closure of the Nashoba Valley Medical Center was announced July 26, 2024, and it closed on Aug. 31, 2024, giving local residents just over a month to make new adjustments.
Thompson said she would like to see another medical center be introduced to the area. “It’s not like we’re in the center of Boston where there are lots of other choices. We don’t have a lot of other choices,” Thompson said. While the hospital closure has burdened the COA and the people it serves, Thompson sees the potential for greater danger in the future. The time it takes to get to a hospital could be the difference between life or death in an emergency.
Ahna Gainey is a junior majoring in communications media at Fitchburg State University.
Townsend fire chief says closure exposes interdependency of regional emergency services
by Katharine Nizwantowski
The closure of the Nashoba Valley Medical Center last Aug. 31 has affected more than residents—it also affected emergency medical services personnel in the surrounding area. James “Jim” Kirk, Townsend’s assistant chief for fire and EMS, has been adapting to the closure and the changes that followed.
“They [NVMC] stopped taking patients a couple days prior [to the closure], because they didn’t want to end up with a patient that would be in the hospital for longer, past the 31st,” Kirk said. So the Townsend EMS was forced to reroute patients to different hospitals, like UMass Leominster.
“The biggest thing that the closing of Nashoba has illustrated for me is that … in northern Middlesex County, the different agencies are very dependent upon one another,” Kirk explained. Townsend often relies on mutual aid, with surrounding towns responding to emergencies in Townsend. In the case of multiple emergency calls coming in at the same time, mutual aid from a nearby town like Leominster will be called to help. This interdependence brings concerns about transport times: Will the ambulance be back in time to assist another patient?
Sometimes, a hospital will have to go on “divert,” meaning it will not accept new incoming patients. Divert can happen for several reasons. “That typically means that they’re at capacity, or they have some sort of equipment that’s not working,” Kirk explained.
Townsend, which has a population of 9,012, receives anywhere from one to 10 fire or ambulance calls per day. Every member of the department is trained for both fire and EMS work.
When Nashoba Valley Medical Center was in operation, it took a Townsend EMS crew about 20 minutes to get from the town to the hospital. Now, with UMass Leominster being one of the nearest hospitals, it takes about 25 minutes. Lights and sirens do make a difference, but traffic can cause delays, especially given the Leominster area is less rural than Townsend.
Kirk, however, is confident his team can deal with these challenges. He also offers words of reassurance to the community. “If you live in Townsend, or the surrounding area that Townsend serves, you should rest assured that you have a very professional emergency medical staff that takes the business of emergency medicine seriously and have dedicated their lives to it.”
Katharine Nizwantowski is a senior majoring in communications media at Fitchburg State University.
