Healey slammed for looking at children’s rehab hospital as a ‘budget problem’

Staffers at Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children are calling on Maura Healey to visit their Canton facility after the governor vowed to reconsider her closure plan in the face of fierce backlash. For over a century, Pappas has provided a haven for Massachusetts’ most vulnerable children and young adults despite some of the buildings on the 160-plus acre campus falling decrepit and not meeting today’s modern standards. Healey has paused closing the multifaceted facility and moving the essential services for those with severe disabilities to Western Massachusetts Hospital in Westfield, over 100 miles away.

She proposed the closure to save costs in the next fiscal year’s budget. Staffers, though, want full assurance that Pappas will not be shuttered and that their patients will not be displaced. A visit from the governor, they say, could carry that magnitude.



“It would make a difference — to see the love, connection and sense of community there,” nurse Maureen Arnstein told the Herald on Saturday. “The children may be sitting in a wheelchair, but they still want to be children.” “They are happy children and young adults.

They have so much to give to the world,” the 17-year employee from Holbrook added. “For Maura Healey to think they are a budget problem, it is just never going to sit well with me. .

.. They are worth the investment.

” The call for Healey to visit campus comes after her administration announced Friday that the closure is far from set in stone and that it looks “forward to continued collaboration on the path forward to provide the best setting for these children.” Thousands of community members — staffers, patients, families and lawmakers — condemned Healey’s proposed closure of Pappas, coinciding with a planned shut-down of Pocasset Mental Health Center, a 16-bed psychiatric hospital in Bourne. Both requests came to light late last month when the governor revealed her $62 billion budget proposal for the next fiscal year — a 7.

4% increase over current spending that Healey has called “balanced” and “fiscally responsible.” The Healey administration has emphasized how legislative approval is not needed for the hospitals to be consolidated, a move that officials have projected would save the state roughly $31 million. At least 281 state jobs would be at risk of being eliminated.

As of Saturday afternoon, a Change.com petition seeking reconsideration from state officials on Pappas’ future had collected over 15,400 signatures in just over a week, with scores of supporters submitting comments highlighting the need for the hospital to stay in Canton. In an interview with the Herald last week, Pappas’ physical therapy supervisor Michelle Sweeney described Healey’s planned closure as “almost criminal” and encouraged everyone to contact their state lawmakers.

Congressman Stephen Lynch broke the news that Healey had started to reconsider her plans during a meeting he organized at Pappas on Friday which drew local and state electeds and state public health officials. “I’m delighted with the governor’s decision to sort of take a second look at this and figure out: Is there a better way that we might address the situation here at Pappas?” the South Boston Democrat said in a news conference after a tour of the campus. After the tour, State Sen.

Paul Feeney said there’s no other place in the state like Pappas and that he’s “deeply grateful” for the progress. Feeney called the plans last week a “unilateral decision” that didn’t include input from stakeholders and community members. “We are in a much better place today,” Feeney said in a video he posted on Facebook.

“That is largely because of the hundreds and hundreds of people, of families, of community members ...

who have reached out to me and my colleagues to say ‘Pappas is worth it.’” A Healey spokesperson confirmed with the Herald Saturday that the governor is also planning to visit the Canton facility sometime within the next week. “Gov.

Healey has said that she wants to collaborate in order to provide the best setting for providing care to these children,” Sweeney told the Herald in a text message Saturday. “When she visits, I know she will find that path forward is at Pappas.” Pappas staffers, joining hundreds of other concerned stakeholders in a Facebook group dedicated to preserving the facility, have expressed their focus is on their patients who they view as a family.

The patients range in age from 7 to 22 years old and have physical and cognitive disabilities as well as chronic and medically complex conditions requiring hospital-level care Pappas provides 24/7 nursing care and therapeutic services including speech and language, occupational, physical, and recreational therapy, and programming to advance independent living skills, among other services. On the 160-plus acre campus, patients learn music, technology, physical education, and art in addition to a general curriculum in classrooms and in other settings. The campus offers a fully accessible swimming pool, an arena for horseback riding, a kitchen where patients learn to prepare snacks and meals, specialized equipment for children in wheelchairs to walk in the hallways, specialized tricycles, and more.

Arnstein, who provides nursing care for roughly six patients in the evening, said she’s seen Pappas’ patient count drop from 100 when she joined 17 years ago to now, roughly 36. Staffers had been told over the years that the number of patients had to be reduced because some buildings needed to be closed so they could be renovated, she said. State public health officials have said more than half of the patients at the 60-bed Pappas are over 18 and are awaiting discharge to more appropriate settings.

Some patients would be transferred to Western Massachusetts Hospital, where the state says it intends to renovate a wing housing a 25-bed dedicated pediatric care program “equipped with enhanced medical infrastructure.” “They have a place in this world,” Arnstein said of her patients. “They have a community at Pappas.

Pappas is not relocatable. The buildings need attention, absolutely, but it’s worth the investment.”.