By Peter Currier
The Sun
AYER, Mass. — It has been a little more than a week since the Aug. 31 closure of Nashoba Valley Medical Center, and some local fire officials are already seeing the consequences.
During the leadup to the Ayer hospital’s closure, those fighting to keep it open argued the result would be increased travel times to further hospitals during medical emergencies, and that ambulances operated by local fire departments are out of service for longer.
According to Ayer Fire Chief Timothy Johnston, these predictions seem to be coming true.
“We have gone from an average 2.7 miles drive, to a 12 or 16 miles drive to either Leominster or Concord,” Johnston said in a phone call Friday. “On Wednesday, we didn’t have at least one of our two ambulances in town pretty much all day …. It is just as we thought it would be. The staff here is always in the ambulance.”
Even when they get to the facility, which will now mainly be UMass Memorial HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital in Leominster or Emerson Hospital in Concord, the ambulances are then affected by potential wait times for their patient to be admitted.
“When they go to Leominster, depending on the traffic it can be an hour, hour and a half before that ambulance is back,” said Johnston. “We are definitely feeling the impact.”
Johnston said the situation would continue to worsen, too. An ambulance remained at the NVMC campus after the facility closed in the event somebody with a medical emergency came the hospital not knowing it was closed. When both of the Ayer Fire Department ambulances were out on calls Thursday, Johnston said they had a third call in town when somebody at the Ayer District Court was having chest pains, and the ambulance at the hospital had to respond. That ambulance was only set to be there until Saturday, seven days after the hospital’s closure, meaning if a similar situation pops up with three separate medical emergencies, there will not be a readily available ambulance in Ayer to respond to one of them.
“If this week is a good sample, which I think it is, it won’t be sustainable,” said Johnston.
With what appears to be a consistently higher workload, Johnston said he is also worried about his medical staff becoming burnt out, a frightening prospect due to what he said is a shortage of paramedics looking for work. With a town budget already approved for the year, Ayer is limited in what it can do to mitigate the damage as a town for now.
In the short term, Johnston said his department could use more equipment to help fill the newly formed gaps. In the long term, he said he will need more staff.
“We have had great help from all of the legislators in all the affected areas,” said Johnston.
Ayer is part of a mutual aid agreement with Shirley and Devens, meaning their respective fire departments will come to the other’s aid if there is a situation where they do not have enough resources to manage an emergency. In Devens, Deputy Fire Chief Timothy Shea said the immediate impact has been limited in his town, with no days so far where their own resources were stretched thin, but they have still seen some immediate effects.
“We have obviously had our transport times increase since it closed,” Shea said in a Monday phone call.
Within the mutual aid agreement, Devens relies somewhat on Ayer for paramedic responses, and there has been at least one occasion since Aug. 31 where Devens needed mutual aid because they did not have an available ambulance, in part because of how much longer it takes for them to return from a call.
“The anticipation going forward is that we will be busier, with all our ambulances having to travel longer distances,” said Shea. “And it isn’t just travel time, it’s the turnaround times at the hospitals, too.”
Shea said he of course still encourages residents to call 911 in the event of an emergency, and that the area fire departments will adapt to the new change.
The closure of NVMC came after the hospital’s parent company, Texas-based Steward Health Care, faced a steep financial crisis and filed for bankruptcy. Six of Steward’s eight Massachusetts hospitals were sold and remain open, but NVMC and Carney Hospital in Dorchester were forced to close due to the Steward crisis.
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