Health Related

Question: Let’s talk about health-related items. When you came to the City of Gardner, there were a number of things going on. Heywood Hospital was going to propose some construction. There was Community Connections that hadn’t gotten built. There was the lack of perhaps some additional dental services. Gardner needed a prevention coordinator. How did it all come about that you started on the road to adding different things?

Answer: Some of it is partnering with our private sector and nonprofit sector institutions and seeing what was needed. Heywood Hospital, with their construction and their finances, that’s going to be an issue. They just exited the Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is great to be able to see them leave that. And they’ve also expanded their services, including the new mental health unit that’s been added. And that’s been thanks in part to partnership with Representative Zlotnick, who’s been able to obtain state funding for them to be able to have these opportunities that are over there. Community health connections, with the new federal funding that they received, has opened up their new second location in Gardner. And I think that’s big to emphasize that it’s their second location, and an expansion of the services that they have in Gardner, with their new urgent care dental health facility, and primary care facility over on Timpany Boulevard, on top of the services that they already offered at the Mary Kane building over on Knowlton Street. The prevention coordinator position, we saw that there was a need for that coming forward when GCAT was losing its funding, the Gardner Community Action Team, to maintain their own director. We undertook that as a city entity and hired our own prevention coordinator with Veronica Patty, who’s the city’s liaison to the recovery and other social service nonprofits that we have in the city, so that we have a ear for that here in City Hall, to listen to the needs of those different various nonprofit organizations and community outreach organizations to see how can we help amplify their voice and bring them together so that we’re more of a cohesive unit, rather than everyone out in their own silos and broke down those barriers so that we had that here in City Hall.

Question: I want to take you back to the COVID vaccine and the rollout. Tell us about the recognition that Gartner got and tell us about the collaboration regarding test kits.

Answer: So the test kit collaboration came from when the CARES Act was first released and the ability to purchase bulk tests was released, you could only buy them per the state contracts in large, large quantities. Quantities that we could use here in Gardner with our population, but when you look at places like Hubbardston that’s got around, you know, a couple thousand, less than 10,000 people in population, that’s a lot of tests that we’re just going to sit there and probably expire before they’re used. So what we did was we reached out to about 13 different communities and not everyone participated in it. And in the end, we’re probably around eight of the 13 said yes, but what it is, is we all chipped in and they wrote checks to the city of Gardner and we bulk ordered these test kits and they reimbursed us for the cost and we gave them their share of those kits so that we could have these regional distributions of COVID test kits for people who were looking to test for travel, for work purposes, for just their own health concerns. And then we worked with the north central region too, to have our vaccine clinics and do it on a regional basis. And then when the state reduced the number of vaccine clinics that were available in the state for efficiency reasons, to really make sure that the resources were being used in the most optimal fashion, Gardner was one of those that stood out as one of the quote high efficiency vaccination centers because of the way that we were able to process people in the most effective and efficient manner through our public, private, excuse me, public private partnerships between the city, Heywood Hospital, the CAC, Mount Wachusett Community College with the nursing program, the Polish American Citizens Club for the location and the city as a whole with our volunteer staff that we had for our registration systems. We were called out by the state for the quality of the services that we were able to provide to the point where when you registered for a vaccine on the state’s registration website.There was one day that the state system crashed, but we did not use the state systems because we had pre-planned and had our own system set up and I got to give a shout out to our tech director, Bob O’Keefe for working to set that up and our emergency management director, Paul Topolski for setting up our call center for the people who were on call to register because there was one day in Massachusetts where the only place you could register for a vaccine was here in Gardner because we were the only place that did not crash due to the demand and that’s why we saw people from as far as Mount Washington and the Berkshires and as far west as that place and as far east as Barnstable and Hyannis on Cape Cod because we were the only place in the state that was able to handle the registrations

The Health and Wellness Fair. That’s something that, again, our prevention coordinator, Veronica Patti, puts on each and every year. She’s a member of the health department here in Gardiner. Again, we’re blessed to have so many resources in the city, but it’s sometimes easy to forget exactly how many resources we have here in the city. So to bring them all under one roof and make sure people know this is what’s right here in their backyard so that even if you don’t need it now, you know what’s there when you do need it, is the point of those events, and it’s been really great.

Question: One of the consequences of the new Waterford Community Center has been a place for the farmer’s market, which has expanded. With respect to health, tell us about what’s being brought there.

Answer: I mean, anytime you can get locally grown, locally sourced produce, you know where it’s coming from, you know what you’re getting, and you know directly what it is that you’re buying. And that’s great to see that not only for the healthy aspect of it, and that people are buying local, less additives, less everything into it, people are eating healthier, but it also connects them directly to the farms in the area too and helps support our local agriculture economy. We’ve got around 55-ish farms in Gardner, which people may not realize, because when you think farm, you think acres on acres on acres of cornfields and everything in between. But I think our smallest farm in Gardner sits on a third of an acre, and it’s a mushroom farm. And it’s someone who’s just, you know, growing food to help out the community and sell their produce. And it’s great, and they’re able to do that at the farmer’s market.

Question: Let’s talk about life issues, what I’m calling life issues headway. Various issues often get in the way of people’s lives, drug addiction, domestic violence, food insecurity, employment skills. Gardner has made some headway with life issues. Could you please tell us the what, the who, and the why?

Answer: The main thing that we’ve been trying to do here, too, is, again, make it that people feel safe here at Gardner. We’ve hired a prevention coordinator in our health department whose job is to work with our different substance abuse organizations, the Gardner Community Action Team, Alyssa’s Place, the AED Foundation, GAAMHA, all of those, and bring them together into the table so that we can work as a cohesive unit and really meet the problem head on so that we don’t have to catch up in the end. And if we can help prevent a problem while, at the same time, finding those resources for people who are going through those issues, they feel a connection here and they feel like they can be safe and call this place their home and realize that people just make mistakes sometimes and sometimes people’s lives get in the way and their decisions have long-term effects, but we want to show that there’s a path forward and that the community is willing to stand with them. In terms of domestic violence, we’ve funded a new domestic violence advocate over at the Gardner Police Station, and we’ll be filling that position soon to make sure if someone’s going through a dangerous situation in their home lives, they have someone to go to for help because a lot of times people just don’t know what to do. And when you bring all of those things together and you find that, people feel like there’s some form of relief. With food insecurity, we’ve done a lot of work with our schools to really make it so that our students don’t go hungry, offering a free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to all of our students in Gardner Public Schools and continuing that in the summertime so that if someone’s home life is just not in a best financial state, they don’t go hungry. There’s a lot of our students in Gardner Public Schools who, if they don’t eat at school, they don’t eat. And that’s not right. So we found ways to help get the nutrition to those students on a permanent basis. And even if they’re not students, working with the CAC and with Growing Places, future plans for a new food distribution location over at the Waterford Street School, soon to be community center, that’s what we’re trying to do there too. And in our employment skills, we’re constantly working with Mass Hire and the Wachusett Business Incubator with our Economic Development Office here at City Hall that if someone’s looking for a new skill or a new way to better themselves or even just resume writing skills, we’ve got resources for people to reach out to.