'Bring one of your yachts to town' — Brockton rally to save Good Sam slams Steward exec
BROCKTON — Brockton firefighters turned their union hall over to nurses Wednesday for a rally against the possible closure of Good Samaritan Medical Center.
About 75 people attended what organizers billed as a community forum about the uncertain future of hospitals owned by Steward Health Care, including Good Sam.
The financially troubled for-profit network has announced it will leave Massachusetts, with elected officials from the governor on down saying "good riddance."
"We need to be having the conversation about how we're going to keep these facilities open," said Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton and a member of the board for the Massachusetts Nurses Association. "We can't undo what Steward has done. From here we need to focus on patients, not profits."
A Steward representative, reached in advance of Wednesday's rally, declined to comment.
With a week to go before a Steward financing deal runs out, no one knows if hospitals like Good Sam will be operated by new owners or shut down.
"We need to do better," said Cari Medina of Easton, who is vice president for Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union. "We need to make the stakeholders say what the plan is for Good Sam."
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Majd Karkour, a unionized pharmacist at Good Sam, told the crowd that the facility is something special.
"Our hospital is not just like another hospital," Karkour said, citing the multiple crises it has weathered, from the shut-down of flooded Norwood Hospital, the closing of Brockton Hospital from a fire and the COVID pandemic. Each time a nearby hospital closed, Karkour said, the patients came to Good Sam.
The Massachusetts Nurses Association represents about 3,000 nurses working in Steward hospitals. Several union members said there was one silver lining amid the uncertainty: the MNA has "successorship" language in its contracts with Steward which would at a minimum provide time for represented workers to remain employed while the new owners and unions work out longer-term arrangements.
Brockton Firefighter Bill Hill called out Dr. Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Steward and, infamously for those who paint him as a villain, owner of two yachts.
"Ralphie, bring one of your yachts to town," said Hill, who is president both of Brockton's Local 144 and the Plymouth-Bristol Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO. He jokingly offered for firefighters to refit it as a floating hospital.
Steward has been behind on rent to the real estate trust that bought up Steward's buildings. There have been reports of Steward vendors repossessing medical equipment for lack of payment. One of those repossessions may have contributed to the death of new mother Sungida Rashid at St. Elizabeth's, according to the Boston Globe.
MacInnis, who has worked at St. Elizabeth's for 26 years, said it was common knowledge that devices called "embolism coils" had been taken back four weeks before Rashid's death.
"There was nobody who didn't know there wasn't an embolism coil in that hospital," said MacInnis, who added that, in fairness, Rashid might have died even if the equipment had been there.
Send your news tips to reporter Chris Helms by email at CHelms@enterprisenews.com or connect on X at @HelmsNews.
This article originally appeared on The Enterprise: Brockton rallies to save Good Samaritan hospital amid Steward crisis
