A decade ago, North Adams Regional Hospital suddenly closed its doors as its then-owners declared bankruptcy. For residents and neighboring communities of North Adams, Massachusetts – the second-largest municipality in Berkshire County – it meant the nearest inpatient care was now over 20 miles away in Pittsfield. Today, the hospital is about to reopen under the ownership of Berkshire Health Systems, as WAMC first reported Thursday. An open house for the facility has been announced for March 7th, with a ribbon cutting three weeks later. BHS spokesperson Michael Leary spoke with WAMC.
LEARY: This process has been a very complex and lengthy one that started in the fall of last year with the announcement that Berkshire Health Systems would be reopening North Adams Regional Hospital. We have had to, of course, go through public meetings, which were very beneficial to us. We have also been working with the state and federal governments to assure the critical access hospitals certification. That work is finally at an end, and we had our surveys over the past several days at the new hospital. All of it went well and we are on track to reopen North Adams in the middle of March.
WAMC: Talk to us about this open house- What are folks going to see when the new and revamped North Adams Regional Hospital prepares to reopen next week?
So, the biggest thing is the inpatient suite that has been built to accommodate, right now, up to 18 admitted patients, which is where we are starting. With our critical access hospital numbers, you can have up to 25 patients at a critical access hospital. We will expand as necessary depending on what we see for volume. But for now, we have the 18 beds which are all individual single rooms, which is of course required now under new hospitals. They will be on display at the open house on March 7th. We will also take people through some other sections of the hospitals such as the surgical suites to show the advanced and state of the art technology that will be used at North Adams Regional Hospital.
Turning to staffing, how many folks will be BHS bringing on to work at the newly reopened NARH?
I believe the number that we were shooting for was in the upper 70s. We made significant progress in doing that. We had a special hiring event just a few weeks ago which was extremely successful, bringing on over 20 new employees right on the spot with a number of others that were in the pipeline for interviews for that. So, we're very confident that our staffing is appropriate for North Adams and we're excited to get the hospital reopened.
Talk to me about communicating with patients in the region. I imagine there are folks in the Northern Berkshires and in fact in upstate New York and maybe Southern Vermont who are looking forward to having an inpatient care facility back in North Adams. What kind of outreach work is BHS doing to get in touch with those folks?
A lot of this is of course, word of mouth. But we've been, we will be advertising quite a bit over the next several months as the hospital reopens. You know, the goal of this entire thing is to ensure that patients who live in North Berkshire or people who visit North Berkshire have an opportunity, if they needed to be admitted to a hospital, they can be admitted locally. They will not have to go to Pittsfield or Springfield or Albany. So, our goal is to keep people closer to home as often as possible, and the new North Adams Regional Hospital will go a long way toward doing that.
What were the considerations to reopening the hospital given the length of time between its closure a decade ago and its reopening now? I mean, of course we're speaking in the world of COVID-19, a world that's seen a lot of public health developments over the last 10 years. Any of that play into the reopening?
I think the primary thing that played into us having the ability to do this right now was the change in the critical access hospital status. The former owners of North Adams Regional Hospital over 10 years ago did try to attain critical access hospital status, but recognized that they were not qualified at that time due to the Route 7 at the time being categorized as a major highway, which, anybody who's driven it, of course, knows it's a nice highway, but it's not a four-lane highway. So, the changeover really last November by the federal government changing the regulations and allowances for critical access hospital was really what got this going, snd we have been pursuing that for a number of years now. And we're just very grateful that the federal government has changed that designation and now allows North Adams to reopen.
Speaking on WAMC’s congressional corner this week, Massachusetts Democrat Richard Neal of the 1st district discussed his efforts behind the reopening of North Adams Regional
NEAL: Generally, we read about hospital closures across America, consolidations or mergers. And in this instance, my staff was able to construct some very careful legislative language that conforms with the intent of what is known as CMS, the Centers for Medicaid Services, and we were able to use geographic variation, coupled with geographic isolation for North Adams in an attempt to get to Pittsfield, and the result has been that we have now been able to come very close and I don't want to trespass, so I’m unlikely to give anything that's specific right now, other than to say, I think we're in pretty good stead.
