PETERSHAM — The widespread word in the regional recovery community about the substance abuse intensive treatment center at the Quabbin Retreat is last month it “abruptly closed,” but the manager of it, Heywood Healthcare, says the program is merely in transition and will reopen and return to its intended services this spring.

Heywood Healthcare acknowledged it has run into financial troubles in recent months, including issues with reimbursement for insurance claims.

Since the summer, Heywood has let go 20 full-time-equivalent employees, including a majority of the employees at the retreat, and a handful of employees at Athol Hospital and Heywood Medical Group, according to the hospital group.

Health care professionals in the recovery community are questioning the long-term viability of the program, which opened in June 2017. The health care advocates point to the mass layoffs of professionals in a field that both the professionals and the hospital note is difficult to find enough qualified employees.

On Friday, the North Quabbin Community Coalition is hosting its regular monthly forum at its Orange location in the American Legion building, 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. The group is expecting representatives from the hospital to attend the meeting.

When it launched four years ago, President and CEO of Heywood Healthcare Win Brown declared, “We have an innovative local solution and the capabilities to implement” the antidote to the community’s mental health and addiction issues.

Today, Heywood says “Dana Day Treatment patients continue to receive services” at Heywood’s Gardner campus, which is for mental health and not for addiction treatment. The Quabbin Retreat is an 86-bed facility.

The Gardner campus does not have a license with the Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services, according to the Department of Public Health, which means it legally cannot offer the same services as the Dana Day.

At Dana Day, patients received both addiction treatment and mental health treatment.

Heywood notes patients continue to receive transportation to and from their treatment, which is now being provided by Woods Ambulance, and supplemented by state funding.

The referral process and telephone numbers to access the services are also still the same, Heywood’s Communication Manager Marissa Colcord said. Area health care professionals said they have been unsure where to send their clients without the Quabbin Retreat and have noted there has been a great deal of confusion for themselves and their clients.

The campus of the Quabbin Retreat also is the home of the McLean Naukeag at Prescott Center treatment program. The McLean Hospital program rents out space from Heywood Healthcare at this campus. This program does have a license with BSAS for addiction services, offering residential services. McLean’s program has 40 treatment beds and opened in April.

“I don’t know if they’ve done things the way I would’ve done, but I do have faith; I have to have faith,” state Rep. Susannah Whipps, I-Athol, said of the situation. “I get calls every week from parents, grandparents, spouses who are actively battling addiction. I have to have faith. Heywood has made an investment that I don’t think they would walk away from.”

Whipps said she believes Heywood will stick to its word and re-open the center in Petersham, which was in the first of a three-phase build out. She said when she first learned about the layoffs, in early August, she spoke with the administration and did so again when learning about the related cuts and financial woes at the Quabbin Retreat.

“I’m confident after speaking with the administration at the hospital, they have a plan to get on track, and I’m going to hold them to it,” Whipps said.

Heywood Healthcare responded to claims the Quabbin Retreat had suddenly closed last month, which it said was not an accurate description of the events.

“In an effort to ensure the strength and quality of behavioral health and addiction treatment services at the Quabbin Retreat, services have been temporarily restructured,” Colcord wrote in a statement.

The changes in services were made to “allow us to complete the credentialing process with several key insurers,” Colcord said, which are “critical for operational sustainability.”

In the winter months, Heywood Healthcare plans to address the credentialing issues and take that time to hire and train employees, Colcord said.

Expressing particular worry over an area that’s been described as a “treatment desert,” Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan, who is a co-chair of the Opioid Task Force of Franklin County and North Quabbin Region, said last year when the Quabbin Retreat opened, “We were ecstatic.”

Sullivan said in a statement in response to the news, “We are quite concerned about this abrupt loss of services to this vulnerable region of the commonwealth.”

Among those let go was Rebecca Bialecki, who parted ways with Heywood in September, after serving the hospital as the vice president of community health and executive director of the Quabbin Retreat. “We are facing revenue constraints and expense challenges,” an email by Brown that went out to staff said. “Like all New England hospitals, we are faced with very difficult decisions to keep our organizations on a steady keel.”

Bialecki, who sits on the Selectboard in Athol, and had worked for Heywood for four years, said after she was laid off “That left no one overseeing the facility.”

Soon thereafter, management terminated Program Supervisor Brian Gordon, who was the primary person running the Dana Day program.

Heywood gave a week’s notice to its patients before they were offered to be transferred to the Gardner offices.

“I think the communication could’ve been better,” Whipps said.

A manager at a local addiction treatment center, with offices in Greenfield and Athol, Maile Shoul, said she hasn’t known where to send her patients since the Quabbin Retreat shifted its services in November.

“It was extremely helpful to have a local option for an intensive outpatient program,” Shoul, an Orange resident, said.

Fewer services in the North Quabbin, at least until spring, will cause residents in the area to find treatment in Greenfield and Worcester, Shoul and other professionals said.

Executive Director of the North Quabbin Community Coalition Heather Bialecki-Canning, who is Rebecca’s daughter, said from the coalition’s standpoint they are “incredibly concerned with how abruptly the change happened.”

The work the North Quabbin has done to fight addiction stigma and provide adequate treatment to members of its community “seems to be unraveling and seems to almost be completely undone in a three-month period,” said Bialecki-Canning, winner of a 2018 Community Star by the National Organization of State Offices of Rural Health.

She said her “fear” is stigma to addiction treatment and how worthwhile it is for patients and for a hospital’s business is “still playing an active part in some of the decision making” around the Quabbin Retreat.

To date, the campus was built out to its first phase, which was highlighted in the 2018 edition of Heywood’s annual magazine. The magazine touted “more than 250 patients and over a thousand lives have been positively impacted by the help and hope of the Quabbin Retreat.”

On a typical day, 10 to 15 patients came through the program, Rebecca Bialecki said. Patients normally spent two weeks at the Dana Day program.

Area providers said they were anecdotally aware of one person who transferred services to the Gardner facility. Heywood did not provide a direct response to how many people went to the Gardner facility at the time of transition, but instead offered there were five patients who were actively receiving services.

“This was planned as we were beginning to phase down for temporary relocation to Gardner,” Colcord said.

The second and third phases of the Quabbin Retreat are not off the table.

“We are actively evaluating the adolescent programming options and hope to have this plan articulated in the spring as well,” Colcord said.

In the 2017 annual report from Heywood Healthcare, the most recent to date, it reported an operating loss of about $1.4 million in the year. In 2016, Heywood reported a profit of $1 million.

In a statement provided by Colcord in response to questions about the status of the Quabbin Retreat, Brown said: “Heywood Healthcare remains fully committed to addressing the behavioral health needs of our region, providing access to high-quality care and addressing the social determinants that most-adversely affect the health of our community.”

You can reach Joshua Solomon at:

jsolomon@recorder.com or

413-772-0261, ext. 264

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