Photo | Courtesy of Heywood Healthcare
Heywood Healthcare co-CEO Rozanna Penney
January 9, 2024
Heywood marks behavioral health milestone as it works to emerge from bankruptcy
Photo | Courtesy of Heywood Healthcare
Heywood Healthcare co-CEO Rozanna Penney (seated, wearing glasses) poses with members of the hospital system's staff at Monday's event marking the reopening of its inpatient behavioral health unit.
Photo | Courtesy of Heywood Healthcare
One of the rooms at the soon-to-be reopened Heywood Hospital inpatient behavioral health unit.
By Emily Micucci
Heywood Healthcare leaders have worked in the last several months to right-size its operations amid an ongoing bankruptcy, said co-CEO Rozanna Penney, but Monday marked a day of regeneration for the Gardner-based health system.
Citing a dire need for inpatient behavioral health services, the 12-bed unit that shuttered at Heywood Hospital in Gardner in October 2021 will partially reopen Thursday, as Heywood announced on Jan. 2. Six beds will come back online.
Heywood marked the milestone with a ceremony Monday afternoon.
Other factors, including a more favorable hiring climate and the need to recoup full payment for those in need of inpatient behavioral health care, were other drivers of the reopening, Penney said in an interview Monday morning.
As of Monday morning, 11 of the 35 beds in the Heywood Hospital emergency departments in Gardner and Athol were taken by people with behavioral health diagnoses – a common practice across the state because of a significant shortage of inpatient behavioral health care. Aside from being inadequate for patients, boarding leads to lower reimbursements from insurance payers compared to admissions for behavioral health treatment.
“It’s truly a crisis in the state,” Penney said.
The hospital cited a weekly update published the first week of January by the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association showing 487 people were boarding in hospital emergency rooms in Massachusetts.
Penney took the helm along with co-CEO Tom Sullivan in the summer, amid financial struggles. Since then, executives have worked to restructure the organization without cutting core patient care services, Penney said. The system, which has hospitals in Gardner and Athol, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October to restructure expenses.
Filling positions
The inability to hire clinicians and nurses was the major factor Heywood cited three years ago when inpatient behavioral health services were shuttered, but headwinds have changed. While hiring people to work in a hospital setting remains difficult – Penney said Heywood is competing against employers offering mental health clinicians and nurses the ability to work remotely or in outpatient settings – conditions are more favorable than they were during the coronavirus pandemic. Rates for travel positions were sky-high, and it was hard for a hospital like Heywood to compete, even offering huge signing bonuses and other perks, Penney said.
With 27 nurses and clinicians staffing the reopened unit and just two or three full-time vacancies remaining, Penney is optimistic the remaining six beds will come back online soon, but she declined to name a date.
“We are actively recruiting and hiring staff. As soon as we are able to fill those positions, we will add them,” Penney said.
The reopening comes as Heywood is experiencing a rebound in surgical volumes. Staffing challenges made it difficult to maintain revenue, but Penney said this fiscal year Heywood has already seen a 14% increase in surgical services over last year.
Karen Donelan, chair of U.S. health policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University
On the behavioral health front, healthcare workforce expert Karen Donelan, chair of U.S. health policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in Waltham said state funding may bolster efforts to open additional behavioral health beds.
In Heywood’s case, state money was approved to pay for enhancements to the Heywood inpatient unit, including security and other safety code upgrades, and the renovation of a therapeutic sensory room, said hospital spokeswoman Dawn Casavant.
Yet, Donelan said improvement in the healthcare labor market is key. Service closures are a longstanding measure hospital systems use to cope with poor labor market conditions.
“We see the labor market regulating a bit, so I think we will see things that have stopped starting again,” Donelan said.
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