[B]arre’s only downtown primary care facility will close at the end of the summer after the retirement of two doctors.
Patients of Granite City Primary Care will be sent to Barre Internal Medicine, about a mile away.
Desiree Bashaw, a licensed nursing assistant at the center, said Granite City was a small practice. After one doctor retired a few months ago and another announced plans to leave in June, that left only one nurse practitioner to see patients.
“This fall, we will merge two medical offices into one, located in Barre, and it will offer a range of service and support for our patients,” Anna Noonan, president of Central Vermont Medical Center said in a statement. “We began communicating with our patients this week, letting them know how our realignment of services will help us better respond to the health care needs of our community.”
The facility has only been open since March 2015, when Mark Yorra, a doctor who ran a private practice in Barre for 35 years, decided to join forces with UVM Health Network to make sure downtown Barre would still have a primary care center after his retirement.
Yorra is now realizing that vision won’t come true. He retired from Granite City Primary Care in November 2017, and in less than two years, the facility is already set to close.
“I feel like they made a commitment to me, to my patients and to the city of Barre to provide and staff and grow a primary care clinic there,” Yorra said. “And I think they’ve gone back on their commitment to do that.”
Yorra said in his experience, about 160 patients would access the downtown facility on foot. He said he’s worried patients won’t be able to get to the new location, which isn’t directly accessible by bus.
“The corporate view of managing primary care, I disagree with,” Yorra said. “They tend to centralize locations. And I think it’s important that primary care be local and accessible in the communities that they’re located.”
In central Vermont, Yorra said, it’s not easy for private practices to exist on their own. Instead, almost all of the area’s primary care physicians operate through the hospital. Yorra said that means there’s a monopoly in place that doesn’t always best meet the community’s needs.
Hospitals have to prioritize economic and efficiency factors, Yorra said, but he feels like while doing so, they’re leaving the needs of their patients behind.
Yorra said as physicians have been leaving Granite Center Medical Center over the past several years without being replaced, the area is starting to face a physician shortage.
“Barre is probably the central Vermont area with the highest health care need,” Yorra said. “I think closing and pulling out of downtown is doing a disservice to the city and to those patients.”
Letters notifying patients of the closure were sent out Friday. The facility is set to close on August 29.
“Central Vermont Medical Center is deeply committed to providing high-quality primary and specialty care to the patients and communities we serve,” Noonan said. “Primary care is core to our strategy to focus on wellness as well as illness, and we continue to recruit doctors who can serve our community.”