HOLYOKE — Members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association union, those dealing with behavioral health issues and their advocates fear Baystate Health’s plan to close inpatient units in Westfield, Palmer and Greenfield and build a new mental health hospital in Holyoke.
On Monday about 30 of them gathered at the proposed site of the $30 million hospital, the former Holyoke Geriatric Authority nursing home at 45 Lower Westfield Road to tell the world.
The protest came as Baystate continues to, in its words, “reevaluate” its relationship with for-profit partner U.S. HealthVest.
Back in August, Baystate scrapped a press conference planned to tout its hospital plans after the Seattle Times reported widespread violations at U.S. HealthVest facilities in Washington state and elsewhere.
On Monday, Baystate spokespeople declined to give an update and referred only to the statement from August.
Karen Nothe-Valley of Monson, a speaker at the protest, said her concerns are more about geography. For 38 years her late mother relied on behavioral health services, often inpatient, at Baystate Wing Hospital in Palmer.
“So I know what can happen when people can’t get the services they need,” she said. “When my mother was going through a crisis it took the whole family to convince her to get in a car and go to get help. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to get her to go further away. Care needs to be local.”
In her later years Nothe-Valley’s mother worked as an advocate for others living with mental health ailments. She died in January.
The nonprofit Baystate Health has 98 inpatient psychiatric beds in Western Massachusetts: 28 at Baystate Wing, 28 at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, 22 at Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield and 20 at Baystate Noble Hospital in Westfield.
The proposed $30 million hospital in Holyoke would have 120 beds.
Under the plan, the Baystate Medical Center beds will remain, while the beds in Greenfield, Palmer and Westfield would be eliminated. Baystate Health has described the existing facilities as outdated and decentralized. Baystate says the combined behavioral health facility would offer specialized care in a centralized location.
The former Holyoke Geriatric Authority nursing home, 45 Lower Westfield Road, seen here Monday, Sept. 23, 2019. The building, closed since 2014, is the proposed site of a new Baystate Health mental health hospital. Jim Kinney/ The Republican
But not when it can take hours to get to Holyoke from Greenfield via public transplantation, said Suzanne Love, a nurse at Baystate Franklin and chair of the Massachusetts Nurses Association bargaining unit there.
“There are enough barriers to mental health care,” she said. “Let’s not add a physical barrier.”
The union feared the impact of a for-profit partner even before the Seattle Times report. Monday, the union called for Baystate to end the partnership with U.S. HealthVest now.
Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse attended the rally. He said Baystate has told the city only what it has said publicly and that it’s reevaluating.
The Holyoke City Council in March approved the sale of the former Geriatric Authority building to B2 Health LLC, a partnership between Baystate Health and U.S. HealthVest, for $2500,000. But the sale is not yet official and no deeds are filed with the Hampden County Registry of Deeds.
Morse said only that Baystate and the city are negotiating a purchase-and-sale agreement and that he’d make more details public when he has them.
The Holyoke Geriatric Authority closed in 2014. Today the building is derelict, with unkempt landscaping and broken windows.
Morse, who is running for Congress in the 2020 Democratic primary against U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, said he backed the Baystate proposal and the sale of the building to bring more mental health services to Holyoke. But citing the mental health challenges his own late mother faced, Morse said he opposes closing inpatient beds at the regional hospitals.
State Rep. Aaron Vega, D-Holyoke, said he too opposes closing beds.
