Steward temporarily shuts cancer care site
Company cites staffing issues in closure of regional unit housed at Brockton hospital
Financially troubled Steward Health Care has temporarily closed the standalone hematology oncology infusion center at its Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton, forcing scores of patients being treated for cancer and blood disorders to look elsewhere for care.
The move, which Steward attributed to staffing issues, comes amid mounting stress on the state health care system, as patients wait for long stretches in some emergency rooms. Meanwhile, officials from Governor Maura Healey’s administration are huddling this week with regional health providers worried that hospitals operated by Steward may close or scale back service in low-income Massachusetts communities.
“We had no notice” when Good Samaritan’s infusion center shut its doors on April 4, said Sue Joss, chief executive of Brockton Neighborhood Health Center, which refers patients needing specialized care to hospitals in the area. “We called them to book a patient and were told they couldn’t book the patient because that was their last day.”
In an April 1 letter to doctors, Steward Medical Group chief operating officer Bianca Duff said services at its regional Hematology/Oncology & Infusion
practice, located at Good Samaritan, “will be temporarily unavailable,” citing the departure of its medical director as the main reason.
The letter, obtained by The Globe, said Steward is “working with highly skilled and experienced providers at other sites to ensure that patients receive their necessary ongoing care.” It advised health care providers to refer new cancer and blood disease patients to a Signature Healthcare center in Brockton, the Dana-Farber Brigham
‘We called them to book a patient and were told they couldn’t . . . because that was their last day.’
SUE JOSS, CEO of Brockton Neighborhood Health Center
Cancer Center at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, and a Steward Medical Group site in Taunton.
Josephine Martin, a spokeswoman at Steward, said the Good Samaritan infusion center “is temporarily paused while we recruit a new provider and staff.” She said Steward is in regular communications with the state Department of Public Health about the move.
The full scope of the disruption in care wasn’t immediately clear. Martin said 69 patients at the Good Samaritan infusion center were referred elsewhere. But some Brockton-area doctors who received the Steward letter apparently notified a larger group of patients they monitor, including some who were treated at the infusion center in the past.
By early this week, 146 patients had made inquiries at Signature’s Green Cancer Center, said Signature spokeswoman Lorraine McGrath. Signature operates Brockton Hospital, which has been shuttered for the past 15 months because of an electrical fire, but its Medical Oncology and Hematology unit remains open in a separate building.
McGrath said Signature was giving priority to 60 patients who were receiving active treatment from Good Samaritan, trying to evaluate their needs while grappling with paperwork on their transfers. “We need to obtain their medical records in order to validate all the tests and treatments they’ve had, and it’s been challenging,” she said.
The shutdown of Good Samaritan’s oncology and hematology center will hit low-income residents especially hard, said Isabel Lopez, founder and director of the Brockton Workers Alliance.
“This is going to affect the community that we work with here in Brockton,” said Lopez. “Brockton is already a city affected by so many challenges. We have people who had to go home after spending eight hours in the ER. Many patients here don’t have the transportation to get to the hospitals in Boston.”
Steward’s cash crunch came to light in January when a commercial landlord, Medical Properties Trust, disclosed that the health system hadn’t been paying its full rent for months. Steward runs a national network of 32 hospitals, including eight in Massachusetts.
The for-profit system closed Quincy Medical Center in 2014 and New England Sinai, a rehabilitation hospital, last month. Steward-operated Norwood Hospital was temporarily closed after a 2020 flood, but efforts to rebuild it stalled earlier this year when contractors halted work, saying they hadn’t been paid.
Steward, which moved its headquarters from Boston to Dallas in 2018, has also been sued by at least two dozen vendors alleging they weren’t compensated for supplies and services.
Staffers at Steward’s St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton said a vendor told them it had repossessed a medical device because Steward hadn’t paid its bills. Weeks later, in October 2023, the hospital didn’t have the device on hand for a woman who had given birth and was bleeding internally. She was transferred to another facility but died.
In 2016, Steward sold its Massachusetts hospital buildings to MPT, agreeing to pay multimillion-dollar leases to the real estate investment trust. Five years later, as its debts accumulated, the company reportedly issued a $111 million dividend to its equity owners, including its chief executive, former Boston heart surgeon Ralph de la Torre.
Governor Maura Healey has called on Steward to turn over its Massachusetts hospitals to new operators, but other hospitals in the state are wary of its heavy rent obligations. In a series of closed-door meetings starting Thursday, state health officials are discussing contingency plans with hospitals and community health centers as they brace for an influx of patients in parts of the state where Steward operates.
In addition to Good Samaritan and St. Elizabeth’s, Steward runs Carney Hospital in Dorchester, Holy Family in Methuen and Haverhill, Morton Hospital in Taunton, Nashoba Valley in Ayer, and Saint Anne’s in Fall River.
Brockton residents have faced a health care squeeze since February 2023, when a fire forced Brockton Hospital to close its doors. Signature, which owns the hospital, said it’s on track to reopen this June. In the meantime, many patients have been diverted to Good Samaritan, where state inspectors last year found safety lapses, recurring
‘Brockton is already a city affected by so many challenges. We have people who had to go home after spending eight hours in the ER. Many patients here don’t have the transportation to get to the hospitals in Boston.’
ISABEL LOPEZ, founder and director of the Brockton Workers Alliance
staffing issues, and patients waiting for hours in the emergency department.
“We have many people looking for health services in Brockton and there’s not enough people there who can provide it,” said Samira Murilla, a Brockton community organizer.
Murilla said she was turned away from the Good Samaritan emergency room on a weekend last year when she sought care for spiking blood pressure after giving birth to her son. Emergency room staffers told her to see her obstetrician-gynecologist the following week, she said.
Steward’s spokesperson said the hospital system follows federal guidelines that determine who gets treated in emergency settings but doesn’t discuss individual cases, citing patient privacy.