BEVERLY — The North Shore Birth Center will remain open for at least the next 90 days, after Beth Israel Lahey Health, which owns Beverly Hospital, reversed course, postponing the planned closure of the center to give the hospital more time for conversations with health officials, elected leaders, and community advocates.
Plans to close the center, which serves the entire North Shore and is the last of its kind in Eastern Massachusetts, were announced in May, as BILH cited staffing shortages at the facility. Officials from across the region spoke out against the closure, which they said would have a disparate impact on low-income families who pay out of pocket for their care.
In a statement, Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson, who spoke out against the closure at a July 20 public hearing, said the delay was a needed step in the right direction.
“Postponing the closure of the North Shore Birth Center is the right decision,” said Nicholson, whose son was born at the center. “Particularly given the state’s healthcare goals and the barriers to healthcare access in Lynn, we should be increasing access to community birth in the region, not taking it away.”
Sen. Joan Lovely (D-Salem), said she and the rest of the North Shore congressional delegation worked hard to get officials to “press pause” on the closure of the Birth Center.
“I’m very pleased to see they’ve pressed pause as we’ve asked them to do so that we can work together with the delegation with the hospital, with any of the communities, the advocacy community, to be able to come up with a plan. Maybe it isn’t reopened to birth in a year, maybe it might take two years, but when you apply for proposals to the DPH to essentially void that license. It’s game over,” Lovely said. “It doesn’t look like that we would be able to reverse that so very happy that Lahey Beverly has said we will press pause.”
Sen. Brendan Crighton (D-Lynn), who joined Nicholson, Lovely, and other members of the North Shore congressional delegation at the July hearing, said there was a lot more work to do to help save the Birth Center.
Crighton said he looks forward to “working with advocates, public health officials, and the hospital” on this issue.
However, despite backpedaling on the center’s closure, hospital officials announced that the center would not be accepting new patients or reinstating former patients, a move that advocates said would render “the birth center closed from a patient’s perspective.”
Lovely said that policy did not concern her, as the center does not have the personnel to support accepting or reinstating patients.
“They literally don’t have the workforce personnel,” she said. “If they can’t provide the services, if they don’t have the personnel, then they can’t. That’s ok.”
While officials work to restore staff at the center, BILH intends to create a somewhat similar setting to the birth center inside Beverly Hospital, Lovely said.
“There are new mothers that want to have this option and we just can’t take that away from them,” she said. “They don’t have the workforce to deliver. So your option is to deliver in the hospital. They’re going to try to recreate a setting in the hospital in the interim and I’m very appreciative of that.”
Rep. Jamie Belsito (D-Topsfield) said the birth center offers a wide range of reproductive health care services.
“When we take a look at how we take care of women, it is in a supportive, caring environment that when the senator, myself and subsequent other legislative leaders, sat at that DPH hearing. I have to be very frank, it was the first time I realized that the Beverly birth center wasn’t just a place I could have had my girls, which if I could go back I would. But I could have been receiving my own gynecological and reproductive health care at this facility, that if my girls, which I have a 12 and a nine-year-old, I would bring them there immediately,” Belsito said. “They do full spectrum care for women, and there were women there well into their 60s talking about how they continue to receive their health care from this facility.”
“This is a fully supportive environment where women can go and they can receive their reproductive care,” she said.