More than four years after flooding devastated Norwood Hospital, and three years after a ceremonial groundbreaking and a promise to rebuild, the news came Monday that it will not reopen.
Steward Health Care, which has already sold five of its Massachusetts hospitals and closed two more as part of its bankruptcy proceedings, had left Norwood’s future in limbo. But court filings Monday show Steward will not renew the hospital’s license when it expires next month.
“The announcement is nothing new to us,” said Tony Mazzucco, Norwood’s town general manager. “Steward has been out of Norwood Hospital for, realistically, about the last 10 months.”
To Mazzucco, the real news is about the related closures: four clinics that moved into temporary space after the flooding, including two in Norwood, that will close by Nov. 5.
“All of a sudden, Steward is now axing another 50 or 60 jobs with next to no notice,” he said. “Steward continues its devastation of the health care industry in Massachusetts, and it’s just further indication of how they treat their employees and how they treated their patients.”
Steward spokesperson Deb Chiaravalloti said that reopening Norwood Hospital is “not feasible” given the company’s financial state.
“This is a challenging situation, and the impact it will have on our patients, employees, and the community we serve is regrettable,” she wrote in a statement. “To ensure that our Norwood affiliated services patients continue to receive high quality care, we are working with them to transition their treatments to another hospital system.”
Mazzucco is confident that a hospital will one day return to the Norwood site, with a couple more years of construction. A real estate trust, Medical Properties Trust, now owns the property and he said work is continuing.
“The commonwealth cannot survive without an additional hospital,” he said, noting that it serves a quarter of a million people. “It was a profitable hospital before the flood closed it. So the hospital will be coming back, it’s just a matter of time.”
A cancer center in Foxborough is among the four clinics that will close in early November. Per its website, the facility employs surgeons, radiologists, nurses and other medical staff.
