For the last 46 years, I’ve been a cardiopulmonary technician at Carney Hospital in Dorchester. Every day, I test people for lung diseases like asthma or bronchitis, helping to diagnose their conditions so their physician can develop a treatment plan.
But this week, I expect to see my last patient. After years of Steward’s financial mismanagement and outrageous payouts to C-suite executives and investors led to the company’s bankruptcy, Steward is preparing to close Carney at the end of August. As a member delegate of my union, 1199SEIU, I’ve spent the last week helping my colleagues transfer to jobs at other Steward hospitals, move to a different health care system, or in some cases, leave health care altogether.
I live in Dorchester, and I’m fearful of what Carney’s closure will do to Boston’s largest neighborhood. The trip from Dorchester to Boston Medical Center or Mass General may be just a few miles, but it’s a burdensome journey for people who rely on the MBTA or don’t have the money to travel. And access to convenient health care will remain limited, as surrounding hospitals struggle with unprecedented capacity levels.
What happens to my community when people get sick at 10 or 11 on a Saturday night, when community health centers and urgent care centers are closed? Our entire health care system is overstretched, and my neighbors don’t have time to wait in line for hours to be seen at a downtown hospital. We need accessible care in our community.
I was relieved to hear the news that the state was stepping in to save Saint Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton and keep five other Steward hospital campuses open, but it also stung — a final reminder that no one was coming to save Carney.
My coworkers, and our patients at Carney – largely Black and brown and low-income or working-class — deserve the same kind of aggressive action from state leaders to protect us from the effects of Steward’s wrongdoing.
Here’s what we need from Steward, and from our federal, state and city leaders:
Paid time off and severance pay
Steward and its investors must pay all laid-off workers what they are owed in accumulated PTO and severance pay. For years, as Steward’s corporate mismanagement and profiteering starved Carney of resources, the hospital was plagued by understaffing. Workers were regularly forced to work overtime or denied the use of their paid time off because they were needed to cover shifts. We missed family functions and cut vacations short, sacrificing our earned time off to help maintain safe staffing levels.
The workers who kept Carney afloat during this crisis could have left and found different jobs. But we chose to stay because we couldn’t abandon our patients. The least Steward and its investors can do is pay workers the PTO and severance pay we’ve earned. Compared to the cost of what has been done to Steward workers, it’s short money.
Accountability for Steward and its investors
Steward’s investors — Cerberus Capital Management, Apollo Global Management, Macquarie, Medical Properties Trust — spent years draining resources from Carney and other Steward hospitals to fuel their astronomical profits. They are to blame for this crisis, and we need federal, state and city officials to hold them accountable to the fullest extent of the law.
Amid the alphabet soup of real estate investment trusts and private equity firms who have been in cahoots with Steward over the past 15 years, it’s hard to tell who the actual people who did this to us are. We know that Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre used the millions he made from selling off Steward’s assets to buy yachts and private jets, but he wasn’t the only one. We still need a true accounting of where the money went, and who profited while Carney crumbled.
And of course, we must make sure that this cannot happen again to another hospital and another community. Health care must be a basic human right, and we need fundamental reforms to end the growing reliance on for-profit and private equity firms to bail out the Commonwealth’s struggling hospitals and other health care providers.
A future of care at Carney
The Steward crisis has exposed a health care system that has been hollowed out. Our hospitals and medical breakthroughs are the envy of places around the world. But in our neighborhoods, working people can’t access primary care and face hours-long waits to be seen at an ER. We need not just quality health care, but quality health care that’s accessible to regular people. Especially in the city’s biggest neighborhood, we need somewhere people can go when an emergency happens in the middle of the night. We need access to primary care and behavioral health services without having to go downtown.
Carney may cease to exist as an acute care hospital, but it can and should be a place where health care workers serve our patients. The state and city must begin a community-led process to shape the future of care at the Carney Hospital site, and preserve critical services that our patients depend on, including emergency services, urgent care, full-service pharmacies, behavioral health services and primary/preventative care.
A stronger voice for health care workers
Working in health care takes a special person. Everyone looks at it as a job sometimes, but caregivers have all been in the position of sitting with someone who is having one of the worst days of their life, and reassuring them that we’re going to take care of them.
I’ve been a patient too. We’ve all been there: sitting in an emergency room scared, when someone smiles and comforts us. As humans, we need that connection, and health care workers provide it. As we move past the Steward crisis and into a new, perilous age for health care in Massachusetts, health care workers know what our patients deserve. We — and our unions — need to be part of the solution.
Karl Odom is a cardiopulmonary technician at Carney Hospital, a Dorchester resident and a member of the health care workers’ union 1199SEIU.
