by John Osborn ·
Friday, March 28, 2025
UMass Memorial Health has chosen a site for the satellite emergency facility it hopes can replace many of the emergency services provided by the Nashoba Valley Medical Center before it closed last August.
In a statement to the Press Monday, March 24, a UMass Memorial Health spokesperson confirmed that the organization had signed a letter of intent to build the facility on an undeveloped parcel at 490 Main Street in Groton. The parcel is located northwest of Groton town center on Route 119 and across the street from an office park that includes Revere Medical, whose physicians formerly worked for Steward Medical Group.
“This location was chosen after careful consideration of the region’s most immediate concerns, including EMS transport times and availability of health care services, and in close collaboration with local fire and EMS chiefs, the Nashoba Valley Health Planning Working Group, and other community stakeholders,” the statement said.
“It’s good news for Groton and good news for the Nashoba Valley region,” said Groton Town Manager Mark Haddad in a Tuesday afternoon phone call.
State Rep. Margaret Scarsdale, who represents portions of Groton and five other Nashoba Valley towns, also welcomed the news. “I look forward to continuing the partnership with UMMH and working on behalf of all the region’s residents and first responders to ensure we restore the vital services our towns need and deserve,” she wrote in an email Wednesday morning.
But for those hoping emergency care could be restored at Nashoba hospital, the news was bittersweet. And for Harvard, the news was seemingly of little consequence.
In a brief conversation Tuesday afternoon, Jason Cotting, co-director of Harvard’s ambulance service, said the town’s crews were unlikely to use the new facility. Travel from Harvard through Groton to the new site would be difficult, he said, compared to the direct access Route 2 provides to HealthAlliance Hospital in Leominster or Emerson Hospital in Concord. The Harvard ambulance transports approximately 60% of its patients to Emerson, and the rest to HealthAlliance-Leominster. However, Cotting said, the Groton facility should reduce the number of patients transported to those two emergency rooms, from Ayer, Groton and towns further north and west, freeing beds and lowering stress on doctors and staff.
To be licensed by the state, a satellite emergency facility, or SEF, must provide the same level of emergency services—24 hours a day, seven days a week—as a traditional emergency department in an acute care hospital. According to UMass Memorial, the new Groton facility will provide imaging and lab services, observation beds, and surgical consultations. Its location is central to the area formerly served by the Nashoba hospital, where patients can be stabilized and their needs for further treatment assessed. The site will include a helipad and an ambulance on standby 24 hours a day to transport seriously ill or injured patients to a full-service hospital or trauma center.
The opening of an SEF in Groton will fulfill a top priority of the Nashoba Valley Health Planning Working Group, the 33-member panel appointed by the Healey-Driscoll administration to study the health care needs of the towns most affected by Steward Health’s abrupt closure of the 60-year-old Nashoba Valley Medical Center in August 2024.
In its final report, released March 12, the now-disbanded working group said such a facility was critical to reducing the numbers of patients being transported to Emerson Hospital in Concord, HealthAlliance Hospital in Leominster, and elsewhere. The SEF should also reduce the time required to respond to a 911 call and get medical attention for an emergency patient, especially for Ayer and Groton, which, according to the report, have experienced the greatest increases in transport time.
The land in Groton is already zoned for business, and an emergency facility is an acceptable use, Haddad said. UMass Memorial will need to go before the Groton Planning Board and Conservation Commission to gain approval for its site plan, a process Haddad said could be completed in six months. UMass Memorial Health has said it hopes to open the facility by November 2026.
The addition of an SEF in north central Massachusetts will be a boon to EMS services in the region, but leaves a number of short-term and long-term problems unresolved.
Many of the doctors and specialists formerly located at the closed hospital in Ayer have moved elsewhere, leaving half the offices in the medical building vacant.
The human toll of the closure is reflected in a survey of 20,000 residents in 10 central Massachusetts towns that was commissioned by the working group and conducted by Health Care for All in October and November last year.
Nearly 5,000 community members responded to the door-to-door survey, an unusually high response rate of 24%. Asked to list their top concerns following closure of the hospital, over half the respondents cited the loss of a nearby emergency room. Another 20% listed the loss of medical specialities, forcing them to travel to more distant locations for testing and care. Loss of access to a primary care provider was the top concern of 12%.
Locating a satellite emergency facility at the shuttered Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer was UMass Memorial’s first choice, according to the Nashoba Valley working group’s final report. But negotiations with the property’s owner, Apollo Global Management, fell apart, leaving UMass Memorial no choice but to look elsewhere. Several area leaders have been critical of the state for not helping close a deal between the two parties, as it did for other Steward hospitals in eastern Massachusetts.
In an interview earlier this month, state Sen. Jamie Eldridge said he appreciated that Gov. Healey had established the working group and that its report had highlighted serious health care gaps in North Central Massachusetts.
“What I would respectfully say to the Healey-Driscoll administration,” Eldridge added, “is that if they thought the report would reduce the frustration and anger in the Nashoba Valley over the hospital closing, the administration would be mistaken. That frustration has grown … as more people are having to go to different hospitals for their care, as we’re hearing from fire chiefs and paramedics of the stress on their lives … and that there still is a sense, a real sense, which I think is accurate, that the administration has not properly paid attention to the gaps in the region.”
In a follow-up interview Wednesday morning Eldridge said that while he was pleased UMass Memorial is going to open an SEF in Groton, he had hoped it would be at the empty hospital in Ayer. But “very sadly,” he said, “I think the hospital opportunity is dead.” His concern now, he said, was ensuring the facility was “as robust as possible” and would serve the needs of the more eastern towns of Harvard, Littleton, and Boxborough.
Meanwhile, the governor has yet to respond to a December 2024 request by the fire chiefs of the six towns most affected by closure of the hospital, including Harvard and Devens, for a $9.6 million grant in fiscal 2026 to help pay “the unfunded financial burden” of operating emergency services without a centrally located facility—a condition the towns will have endure for the next 18 to 24 months.