North Adams Regional Hospital sits on a hilltop overlooking the city, surrounded by a ring of mountains at the top of Northern Berkshire County.
Everyone in North Adams – both inside and outside the hospital – remembers the day it suddenly closed in March 2014.
“The end came upon us suddenly, unexpectedly, and it was devastating for the employees and for the community," said anesthesiologist David Wilson. "The effects were wide reaching.”
Wilson has worked at the facility for more than 30 years. This month will end a decadelong wait as North Adams Regional Hospital prepares to reopen inpatient care.
“It’s incredibly satisfying and unexpected,” he told WAMC.
Berkshire Health Systems – the region’s largest healthcare provider – bought the hospital after previous owner Northern Berkshire Healthcare declared bankruptcy. While it’s offered emergency care and limited services in the years since, recent changes to federal critical access hospital certification standards have allowed for it to dramatically expand its capabilities.
“The changes here mean that patients will be able to stay overnight in a hospital bed in North Adams, which has not been the case for 10 years," explained Wilson. "And also we'll be able to do bigger surgeries, more complex surgeries here than we have over the past 10 years, because we'll be able to have patients stay overnight here after surgery if necessary.”
The first inpatients to receive care here are expected to be admitted by the end of the month.
“We had the facility licensure survey last week. It was three days in duration. So, we're waiting for the report from the state, but we didn't see anything that was going to get in the way of being able to open the hospital," said BHS President and CEO Darlene Rodowicz. “Joe LaRoche – who's in charge of our facilities and life safety – we'll make any changes that come out of that report, and then we'll get the license. Then from there, we are waiting for the DEA and the [Massachusetts] Controlled Substance licenses to be able to dispense meds. And we hope at that point, we'll be able to transition from BMC to North Adams.”
North Adams Regional will have 18 beds upon reopening, with the option to grow to 25 if BHS deems it necessary.
“Once we have the license, then we have to get certificates from Radiation Control, which we already have," Rodowicz continued. "We have to get one from the lab called CLIA. That one should be coming imminently after we get our license.”
Once patients are actually being treated, BHS will face a survey from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
“The CMS survey is an unannounced survey," Rodowicz said. "It could happen three days after we open, it could happen two weeks after we open, it could happen 60 days after we open.”
In addition to external regulation and licensure hurdles, BHS is also putting the new and improved North Adams Regional through its own tests.
“Next Monday, we have five different scenarios of patients that we're going to be bringing through as mock patients to go through every possible scenario that we will encounter when we're on the floor. We can't think of everything, but we thought as much as we possibly could," said Senior Director of Operations Bob Boebert. “So, we have a patient that will come into the ED, this one will probably be an elderly female patient that’s going to come in [with] shortness of breath, her history is going to- She's going to have some type of a respiratory history. So, she's having difficulty breathing, and she's on oxygen at home, but she's getting a little worse, so she comes into the [emergency department]. And the ED is going to do a full workup for her, and we're going to do a cardiac workup that's going to be negative in the ED. So, she'll be appropriate for an admission to up here based on our information down there. She’ll go through- Down there, she’ll go through X-rays and labs and everything that you would typically do for a patient. Once she comes up here, we'll get her settled in, and then we'll move on to day two. And on day two, her cardiac status is going to go downhill a little bit. And so, we're going to do more cardiac workup and find out that she's actually having a heart attack, and then that patient will have to be discharged down to BMC. So, we'll do that whole practice of getting the patient here down to BMC.”
Director of Operations Lou Ann Quinn is leaving the hospital after a long career as it prepares to begin a new chapter.
“This is exciting," she told reporters. "This is just everything to me. When the hospital closed, I had opportunities to go anywhere, and I chose to stay with my community. And I was honored that Berkshire Medical Center hired me to kind of be that transition person.”
While the inpatient beds will allow for a larger menu of services, North Adams Regional will still send patients in need of trauma care to other hospitals.
“Sending trauma to where trauma belongs is the way we should do it. We provide the same level of STEMI care, which is heart attack care, but we send them to Bay State, or if they're a patient that is a non-STEMI, we oftentimes go to Berkshire Medical [Center]. So, we're going to care for the patients that we should care for here.”
While there is no hard date for North Adams Regional’s official opening day, a ribbon cutting is scheduled for March 28th.
