SHARON — Celebrity residents like Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick may add sparkle, but the heart of the Litchfield County town of Sharon is its hospital, residents say.
“We’re a hospital town — everything’s interconnected,” said Brent Colley, outgoing first selectman of Sharon. Colley’s wife works at a medical office linked to Sharon Hospital and his two kids were born there. His wife has also been treated for cancer there twice.
Sharon Hospital is also the town’s largest employer and draws visitors from throughout the region to the upscale shops and cafes that dot Sharon’s main streets.
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And now that the hospital’s owner has attempted to cut back on key services like its birthing center and intensive care unit, townspeople are worried.
“It’s a scary time for everyone,” Colley said. He compared the impact of the hospital’s downsizing to the slow decline of the Gilbert & Bennett wire factory in his Fairfield County hometown, Redding.
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“We really suffered when we lost the heart that provided so much to the community, so it could be a similar situation like that,” Colley said.
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In the latest chapter in Sharon Hospital’s downsizing, owner Nuvance Health of Danbury is appealing a decision by the state to reject its bid to close the birthing center.
Nuvance is losing $3 million a year staffing the labor and delivery unit at Sharon Hospital due to staffing difficulties and declines in demand, an attorney for the health system told officials from the state’s Office of Health Strategy at a Nov. 8 hearing.
Amid the stats illustrating Nuvance’s losses from Sharon Hospital was a clear message: Keeping the birth center open could endanger the survival of the entire institution.
“This decision threatens Sharon Hospital’s ability to continue delivering care in northwestern Connecticut,” Nuvance attorney Ted Tucci said.
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The state will issue a decision on Nuvance’s appeal within 90 days of the Nov. 8 hearing, an OHS representative said.
Deep roots in town
Walk past the columns into Sharon’s 1875-vintage town hall and you’ll see a framed photo right outside the first selectman’s office: The “new hospital” built on site of the current one on Hospital Hill Road in 1916. That building took the place of the town’s first hospital, founded by Dr. Jerome Chaffee in 1909.
When Colley started his first of five terms as Sharon First selectman in 2013, Sharon Hospital was owned by for-profit Essent Healthcare of Connecticut and making $2 million a year in profit. But a shift in tax structure and a steady decline in patient volume began taking its toll.
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By the time New York-based nonprofit system Health Quest bought the hospital in 2017 it was reporting annual losses of $2.5 million. Citing those deepening losses, Health Quest proposed closing the birth center in 2018 sparking a community outcry, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal.
Health Quest merged with Western Connecticut Health Network in 2019 as part of a $2.4 billion deal to form Nuvance Health, an alliance that brought Sharon into a network with Danbury, Norwalk and New Milford hospitals, along with New York’s Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie and Putnam Hospital Center in Carmel.
Sharon now has 78 available beds and operating losses that ballooned to $23 million in fiscal 2022. Nuvance formally petitioned the state to close the birthing unit in January of 2022, citing its financial woes along with declining births and the aging demographic in the area.
But town and state officials pushed back, citing the popularity of the hospital in communities in neighboring New York towns with a younger and more diverse demographic.
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Connecticut’s northwest corner — and Sharon Hospital’s service area — extends across borders due to the area’s rural and remote landscape, Colley said. In addition, the pandemic has brought new younger families to the area who prefer not to drive more than 30 minutes on hilly roads for maternity services, he said.
Most of all, the birthing center represents a continuity of care for local residents, Colley said.
“The doctors that we have here are great, not only are they delivering babies, but they’re helping the women throughout their life,” he said. “We’re just kind of pleading with them to reconsider this,” he said of Nuvance’s bid to close the unit.
'Corporate medicine’ comes to town
With its faded children’s artwork on the walls, family photos and copies of Yankee Magazine piled up in the waiting room, Dr. David Kurish’s office across the street from Sharon Hospital could be a set from a nostalgic TV show like “Leave it to Beaver.”
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But Kurish acknowledges that the old-school medicine he has practiced in Sharon for decades may be a thing of the past.
“It used to be 36 hospitals in Connecticut 40 years ago, now it’s (four) big chains. And it’s such a shame because it’s denying care to people in more remote areas,” Kurish said.
Nuvance’s fight to close the maternity unit at Sharon Hospital has already impacted the town’s medical community, which is down to one obstetrician-gynecologist from three several years ago, Kurish said.
“Unfortunately, the hospital is litigating this and delaying it, and it just makes it more difficult for women,” Kurish said.
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Even as Kurish fights to keep Sharon Hospital central to town life, Nuvance seemed to push back at that vision of health care at the Nov. 8 hearing.
“We don’t live in a ‘Leave It to Beaver’ world,” Nuvance attorney Tucci told the OHS at the Nov. 8 hearing. “The days of small community hospitals being what they once were are simply over.”
Patients across Connecticut in both big cities and small towns will increasingly encounter what he terms “corporate medicine,” Kurish said, with consolidation and profit-based decisions that impact both cost and convenience.
“To me a hospital doesn’t have to be a profit-making venture — it shouldn’t be. It’s supposed to serve the community,” Kurish said.
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