Recent news has been grim about the future of medical care in our capital city. Dire finances have essentially endangered two of our local institutions: Roger Williams Medical Center and Fatima Hospital, threatening the closure of both. It is important to note that this would effectively halve the number of hospitals in Providence for general medical services. Women and Infants, Hasbro, and Butler are specialized centers, leaving only Rhode Island Hospital and Miriam for the larger, collective public. To put that into further perspective, Rhode Island Hospital hosts 719 patient beds, while Roger Williams and Fatima together have slightly over 500. That’s a considerable loss to the city, potentially.
This all started when Prospect Medical Holdings, a California-based hospital operator filed for bankruptcy last January. Prospect’s Rhode Island chapter, CharterCare, operates both Roger Williams and Fatima. For these two to remain open, the challenge now becomes securing the finances to continue operations. Enter the Centurion Foundation, a non-profit fighting to find the funds to keep them afloat. Convincing investors to buy the bonds that would pay for its acquisition of the hospitals has proven a challenge.
Concurrently, state officials like Governor Dan McKee and Attorney General Peter Neronha are exploring alternative options, admitting that the closure of these hospitals would be “catastrophic” for the state’s healthcare system. Geographically, these two endangered hospitals serve the entire north end of Providence. Continuing further north, the next closest twenty-four hour emergency room would be Landmark Hospital in Woonsocket. The possibility of creating a medical care desert in our North End is a very real threat.
Additionally, these two facilities offer invaluable resources like mental health care, cancer treatment, and emergency services to a notoriously underserved, and sometimes impoverished community. One only needs to look as far as Pawtucket to see the potential consequences of such an outcome. In 2018, Memorial Hospital shuttered its doors there, leaving in its wake a neglected and often vandalized structure that dominates the neighborhood with an eerie aura of abandonment. Developers have been unsuccessful in their attempts to convert it into affordable housing and while some limited outpatient services have been restored, the block-wide building casts a dark shadow over adjacent residences.
Admittedly, I may be a bit biased when it comes to Roger Williams Medical Center. From the age of eighteen to thirty-five I worked there as a security guard. There, I learned the nuances of crisis prevention and violence de-escalation. I was born in their next-door building, the old Providence Lying-In Hospital. Many of us older Rhody residents were as well, before the construction of Women and Infants. I’ve lost count of the stories I could tell from my time there. Despite the sense of nostalgia, I also got to see first-hand how this facility served the immediate area. This is a mosaic I have been a part of for my entire youth and to see it go would be beyond tragic.
Sentimentality aside, time is running short. In the meantime Attorney General Peter Neronha has brokered short-term financing deals, using escrow funds from Prospect’s original 2021 acquisition, to keep the hospitals operating month-to-month through until the end of January. A federal judge has granted Centurion until then to finalize their purchase. What happens after that remains to be seen.