Boston’s commissioner of public health said this week that she remains “very concerned” about the impacts of the Carney Hospital’s closure, particularly on the network of community health centers that are struggling to deal with an increased patient load amid an uncertain economic outlook and menacing federal administration. And with a heavily used medical office building still slated to close its doors on the campus later this month, Dr. Bisola Ojikutu noted to The Reporter on Monday that the special working group on the Carney, which the Public Health Commission helps to lead, has not finished its mission.
“In the coming months, the working group will reconvene and discuss the way forward,” Ojikutu said, adding, “but in the meantime… as the mayor and the governor’s office are processing the recommendations, we will continue to have meetings with stakeholders internally and stakeholders, including the [property] owner, to map a feasible and sustainable way forward.”
Ojikutu’s comments come a week after the release of a 61-page report from her group that offered an assessment of needs and possible re-uses for the abandoned Carney campus on Dorchester Avenue, but did not issue a specific, immediate solution to the gaping hole left in the wake of Carney’s abrupt closure last August.
Instead, it underlined the general need for “direct health care services” on the site and suggested that a mix of uses could replace the former community hospital.
Ojikutu, who co-chairs the 33-member working group, noted that Mayor Wu will host a meeting next week with community health center leaders from across the city to focus on the financial and workforce pressures that the report asserts have become even more acute since Carney’s shut-down in August 2024.
“The community health centers have done a lot of the heavy lifting in regards to meeting the increased needs of patients, post-Carney closure,” Ojikutu said in the interview this week. “However, they were also doing a lot of heavy lifting prior to Carney’s closure. So they’ve been under strain for a long time, and we really want to be mindful of that. In our recommendations, we do speak to the need to advocate for increased funding and resources for our community health centers.”
Ojikutu said that Wu will convene many of the local health center leaders at City Hall “to talk about some of the challenges that they are facing across the city, but particularly in the Carney’s former catchment area. “Clearly, we’re talking about the ones [such as] DotHouse and Codman and, and Mattapan Community Health Center. But across the city, there are many challenges… We are very privileged to have the network of community health centers that we have in Boston, but we need to help them from a resource standpoint. So that meeting will take place next week.”
Michael Curry, CEO of the Mass League of Community Health Centers, co-chaired the working group with Ojikutu. He called the production of the group’s report to Healey and Wu “a daunting task.” Curry described the aftermath of the Carney’s closure as a “tsunami” for local health centers that were already grappling with a public health crisis before the hospital’s abrupt closure last August.
“It was exacerbated by the Carney closure,” said Curry, who says wait times at local health centers have increased, along with a back-log for patients hoping to make appointments with physicians, sometimes forcing people to wait up to six months to be seen.
“That’s never been acceptable,” said Curry. “Carney’s closure makes that even more of a crisis. How do we make sure people get seen at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost.”
The crisis that Curry and other community health center leaders describe could deepen if — as feared— Washington Republicans make cuts to Medicare coverage. In today’s edition of the Reporter, a group of CEOs representing seven Dorchester and Mattapan health centers penned an op-ed warning of the looming threat.
“They pose a serious threat to our patients who rely on community health centers for critical, accessible care every day. Medicaid is essential to their well-being, and any reduction in coverage would be devastating,” the group writes.
In the working group report made public last week, the panel offered broad recommendations, including one that the city and state “encourage the creation of a set of co-located health services to be included in any proposal seeking city and state approvals such as a high-quality urgent care center that accepts public and private insurance.”
It also advised that Gov. Healey and Mayor Wu “explore all available state and federal capital funding sources as well as any other mechanisms for operational funds to support the creation of new facilities serving the catchment area.”
The report concluded: “Given the size of the hospital campus, the site could accommodate multiple uses, including direct health care services and uses that address longstanding unmet health-related social needs, as well as close gaps in social determinants of health.”
Members of the working group included several Dorchester elected officials, including City Councillor John Fitzgerald, who has been a vocal proponent of re-using the Carney site for health services.
“After viewing these recommendations, I think the foundation for the re-use of the land has started to come into focus,” FitzGerald told The Reporter on Monday.
“There is an understanding of a medical use, be it a specialty type hospital that provides a service that can draw in a different payer mix which in turn supports an Emergency Department for instance, accompanied by a clear demand for other services that address multiple social determinants of health for our surrounding community.”
The report also urges leaders to focus on “the need to financially support organizations, including the area’s wealth of community health centers that have been working under challenging circumstances to address gaps in health services created or worsened by the closure of
Carney Hospital.” The closure of the Carney’s emergency department and behavioral health are underlined as urgent gaps in the local health care ecosystem, along with the dearth of primary care options in the neighborhoods most served by Carney.
In Monday’s interview, Ojikutu said that there has been no signal that the Seton Medical building on the Carney campus will stay open, as she and Mayor Wu requested last winter.
“There haven’t been changes to the plan to close the Seton Medical Office building that I’m aware of,” Ojikutu said. “I would say that our overarching goal is really to look at the entire campus and to focus in on the fact that there are healthcare services, healthcare delivery that need to occur on the campus as we move forward with a larger plan.”
Any plan that might emerge in the coming weeks and months for a re-use of the Carney site will — by necessity— involve the owners of the property, Apollo Global Management, a New York City-based company. Ojikutu said on Monday that officials from the Wu administration have stayed in contact with representatives of Apollo.
“And we have had ongoing discussions and I think those discussions have been important,” she added. “We’re hoping that there will be a feasible and sustainable way forward that culminates from this process.”
FitzGerald said that he believes that Apollo is open to a cooperative approach to re-use.
“In my conversations, I think the owner of the land sees a real opportunity to be an innovative partner in delivering healthcare that can be a breath of fresh air in that sector and a huge benefit to Dorchester.
“As I’ve been saying, there will be other uses on this site and those conversations continue to evolve as we move forward with a clean slate here.”
