Trustees at the Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket hospitals this week announced their intention to join Massachusetts General Hospital and its parent company, Partners Health Care, as affiliates by the end of the year.
Just seven weeks after announcing their intention to negotiate an
affiliation with the giant Partners Health group, Martha's
Vineyard hospital trustees voted unanimously to approve the landmark
sale agreement on Saturday.
Foundations for the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital won’t be poured until spring, but already the hospital has big plans for the rooftops.
This week the hospital received notice from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the state’s development agency for renewable energy and the innovation economy, that the hospital will receive a $198,000 design and construction grant for solar electric panels atop the new building.
Health and human service agencies on the Vineyard are already feeling the effects of severe state budget cuts made last week by Gov. Deval Patrick and are bracing for more in the months ahead.
State funding to Family Planning of Martha’s Vineyard and Martha’s Vineyard Community Services was slashed in the cuts, while directors at the Island Health Care Rural Clinic in Edgartown and the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital were busy this week preparing for spending and hiring freezes.
Partners HealthCare will honor employees at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and Windemere Nursing and Rehabilitation Center today, Friday, Feb. 1 in the 12th Annual Partnership in Excellence Awards.
Partners owns the hospital and nursing center. This is the first year the Vineyard hospital and Windemere employees are eligible for nomination.
O n Saturday, Feb. 14, we set out in the morning from Chilmark for a shop in town and a Valentine’s Day drive. It was a sunny day though terribly cold and strangely still back in Vineyard Haven on this long winter weekend to mark Presidents’ Day — a great opportunity for Islanders to escape to mainland shops, northern ski slopes, or Bahamian bliss. After a quick grocery shop, my husband Peter and I left town behind and drove past the frozen quiet MV Shipyard, the windswept buildings of the Packer Company, and out along the causeway toward Oak Bluffs.
Some 1,500 lower-income Vineyard residents face the prospect of having to find new health insurance because the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital has determined its current insurer is not directing enough patients to its affiliated hospitals in Boston.
More than four years after the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital was required, as a condition of its expansion, to spend $2 million on community health programs, not one dollar has yet been spent on initiatives not directly connected to the hospital.
Under the terms of approval by the state Department of Public Health, the hospital was supposed to begin distributing the money in January 2006. The five-year timetable for the expenditure meant it all should have been distributed by January 2011.
A Martha’s Vineyard Hospital plan to create two new large parking lots has residents of the surrounding Oak Bluffs neighborhood on edge over the institution’s continued expansion.
