Once seen, Aupperlee, 82, was then placed in a bed in a hallway with four other patients. The workers were thoughtful and attentive, Bourgeois said, but visibly busy. It took about 10 hours to get Aupperlee admitted to a hospital room. Eventually, after a follow-up appointment, she was diagnosed with colon cancer and is now recovering from surgery.

“I don’t think I’m going to go back,” said Bourgeois, who lives in Leominster. “If she gets sick again, I think I’ll take the (extra time) … and go to Emerson Hospital” in Concord, 24 miles away.

But Emerson is also facing a surge in patients. Each hospital is within 20 miles of Nashoba Valley Hospital, one of two facilities in Massachusetts that are part of the Steward Health Care system. which closed almost three months ago. Hospitals in Emerson and Leominster are now grappling with an influx of patients as Steward’s collapse and the closure of its hospitals continue to send shockwaves through already overburdened emergency departments.

In September, four hospitals closest to Nashoba and Carney Hospital in Dorchester, the other closed facility, saw the largest increases in emergency room patients statewide compared to the same month in 2023, according to a Boston Globe analysis of statewide hospital data.

Leominster Hospital, which is owned by UMass Memorial Health, reported a 20 percent increase, more than any other hospital in Massachusetts. Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, about five miles northwest of Carney, Jamaica Plain, reported a 14 percent increase. Hospital staff and state public health experts said it was too early to know whether those former Steward patients would turn to those hospitals for long-term care, but October appeared to be just as busy, health officials said. And the seasonal surge of respiratory viruses like COVID and RSV that tend to send people to the emergency room. is probably still ahead.

“What we know with absolute certainty in emergency medicine is that whatever you see in November, it will be much worse in January,” said Dr. Eric Dickson, chief executive officer of UMass Memorial Health, who described the service Leominster Emergency Department. like the busiest he’s ever been.

Dr. Ali Raja, vice chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, estimated that Faulkner’s emergency department sees two to three patients daily with Dorchester ZIP codes, who likely travel to Carney. That may not sound like much, but Raja said it doesn’t take much to add pressure to already overburdened emergency services.

The stewards’ health system declared bankrupt in May. A state-coordinated rescue led to the sale of St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Brighton, Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton, Morton Hospital in Taunton, St. Anne Hospital in Fall River and the Holy Family in Methuen and Haverhill. Carney and Nashoba did not receive qualified offers and both closed in late August.

This had immediate repercussions.

In Ayer, an ambulance ride to Nashoba Valley took about 20 minutes at most, said Timothy Johnston, the town’s fire chief. However, after its closure, the journey to the nearest hospital was almost double. Three times in September, he said, his department called in helicopters to transport patients who likely would have been transported by ambulance to the Nashoba Valley a few weeks earlier.

“It’s unusual for us,” Johnston said. “That may not seem like an astronomical number, but it’s three times more than we’ve done in recent years.”

Before Carney closed, Faulkner’s emergency department, already struggling with overcrowding, typically had to keep eight patients a night in beds located in hallways. Today, 20 is more common, said Diana LaRock, a registered nurse who worked at Faulkner. for three years.

“It’s certainly not the ideal place to care for anyone,” said LaRock, who added that the hospital has brought in traveling nurses to bolster staffing, but progress has been slow and staff shortages remained a problem.

Other hospitals have also added staff, administrators said.

Hospital administrators said they were managing the additional patients. But front-line staff said long waits for care, dealing with patients in hallways and heavy workloads all play a role in worsening patient care. The Massachusetts Nurses Association, which represents nurses and other health care workers, is pushing for more staff raises.

“Unfortunately, you’re taking care of your sickest patients, and you’re doing the best you can, and sometimes that can be absolutely dangerous,” said Antoinette Pontes, a registered nurse in the emergency department at Framingham Union Hospital.

Steward’s collapse coincided with a slow crisis in emergency medicine in Massachusetts.

A shortage of primary care doctors and delays in care during the COVID pandemic have led more patients to visit emergency rooms and often show up sicker than before, doctors said.

“Even though it seems like the pandemic is well behind us, there is a long tail in how people have used health care or how they have experienced health care versus how they are experiencing it currently,” said Dr. Barrett Kitsch, Emerson’s medical director. officer.

Meanwhile, patients are staying in emergency rooms longer than before the pandemic, according to the state department. Center for Health Information and Analysisin part because of reinforcements at other medical facilities where they would otherwise go next. Called residents, these patients I can wait for hours, even dayso be discharged to psychiatric beds, nursing homes or specialized care units which may be understaffed or themselves overwhelmed.

Faulkner has 80 emergency room beds, Raja said, but most are sometimes occupied by patients who no longer need to be there.

“New patients who come through the door find themselves competing for the same 20 or 30 beds, or being treated in chairs,” he said.

Emergency department boarding is associated with worse outcomes and these patients are more likely to suffer from medical errors or die from complications, health experts said.

“We face a serious capacity challenge across the entire health care spectrum,” said Robbie Goldstein, the state’s public health commissioner.

DPH attempted to address overcrowding this summer by offering incentives to encourage eastern Massachusetts residents to use urgent care centers instead of emergencies. But hospitals in the region has not seen much relief. With the exception of Steward Hospitals, patient volumes at the 39 affected facilities from July to September, the period of the initiative, were comparable to those in the same months a year earlier, according to state data.

Urgent care centers had slightly higher volume, said Jim Brennan, president of the Urgent Care Association of Massachusetts. Goldstein stressed that it’s impossible to know how much worse emergency department overcrowding might have been this summer without the DPH initiative. Hospital officials worry, however, that there is no short-term solution to significantly reverse the trends that are putting pressure on emergency departments.

“From what I’ve heard, there’s nothing that’s going to make a significant change,” said Raja, of Faulkner. “It’s adding patients to a system that has already had many more patients added to it. »

Marilyn Warren, who took her niece to Faulkner in mid-November, is among those displaced by Carney’s closure.

“Carney is next to me and I miss Carney,” she said.

In September, numbness in her left hand landed her in the emergency room at Boston Medical Center, where she was troubled by the number of patient beds in the hallways. So when her niece complained of stomach pains a few weeks ago, they tried Faulkner instead. They arrived at 10:30 a.m., were spotted relatively quickly, but then waited nearly eight hours before doctors sent Tyra home with an antibiotic.

“I would have gone to Carney,” Warren said. “The wait has never been longer in Carney.”

Jason Laughlin can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him @jasmlaughlin.