A community health center in one of Providence’s poorest neighborhoods is closing July 31, shutting down a source of primary care for more than 4,500 of some of the state’s most vulnerable patients.
The operator of the Olneyville Health Center, the nonprofit Providence Community Health Centers, or PCHC, has cited a shortage of providers and other financial constraints.
PCHC is Rhode Island’s largest federally qualified health center, the safety net of last resort for the uninsured, the underinsured, and other vulnerable people
The Olneyville Health Center, at 100 Curtis St., cares for people from a senior housing building next door and low-income families with children and undocumented immigrants, according to providers at PCHC. Providers at the center said they currently care for more than 5,500 patients, though Brett Davey, a PCHC spokesman, said the number seen at least once in the past three years is about 4,500.
Most of the Olneyville center’s patients and providers will be transferred to the PCHC-Atwood center, at 31 Atwood St., about a half-mile away, Davey said.
But the health center’s providers said they were told this week that the pediatric patients will be transferred to either PCHC-Central, at 239 Cranston St., or PCHC-Chafee, at One Warren Way, which are 2 miles and 3.5 miles away, respectively.
“When those community [health] centers close…it’s devastating to the community,” said Morgan Leonard, executive director of Clinica Esperanza, which serves many of the city’s uninsured residents. “People identify with that place with the staff, they get really comfortable…They’re scared to go anywhere that’s not what they know.”
The Olneyville health center’s closure follows PCHC’s layoff of more than 40 employees, first reported by The Providence Journal, many of whom helped connect patients with housing, food, transportation and other services.
“This does not bode well for patient care,’’ said Debra Hurwitz, a registered nurse with an MBA and executive director of the nonprofit Care Transformation Collaborative of Rhode Island. The nonprofit aims to improve the quality and affordability of primary care. “My colleagues are [saying] this could be the beginning of a death spiral.”
An internal June 28 memo emailed to PCHC managers from the nonprofit’s CEO Merrill Thomas said the decision to close Olneyville Health Center is due to program funding cuts, inadequate state Medicaid reimbursement rates and a drug pricing program that “have placed our organization in an unsustainable negative financial position.” The memo also cited the impact of the national shortage of primary care providers.
“These decisions were not made lightly,’’ Thomas said in the memo, “but are necessary so we can continue to serve our community and sustain PCHC.”
Providers said that many of the patients do not have cars and either walk to the clinic or take public transportation.
They are people like Maria Martinez, a 68-year-old retired factory worker and immigrant from Puerto Rico who lives at the senior living apartments next door to the Olneyville Health Center.
She has no car and calls a car service to drive her three times a week to appointments at a dialysis center. And every three months she visits her primary care doctor. She left another clinic, which she had to get a ride to, so that she could walk to the health center next door.
“It’s easier for me to come over here,’’ she said. “For me [it’s] near my house. And I love my doctor, too.”
Three of the four providers at the Olneyvill center will move to Atwood; the other is moving to the Chafee center, Davey said.
The PCHC told state health officials that they would provide free transportation to the Olneyville center’s patients to the other clinics.
The PCHC described the center’s closure as temporary, though indicated no plans to reopen the clinic. “The re-opening is dependent on our ability to hire more primary care providers,” Davey, the PCHC spokesman, said in an email.
The retrenchment by the state’s largest federally qualified health center comes at a time when clinics offering care for the uninsured or underinsured are experiencing rising patient enrollments.
Roughly 57,000 Rhode Islanders lost their Medicaid coverage since the peak in 2023, prior to the end of the pandemic emergency, according to state Medicaid data. It’s not clear how many of those people may have obtained employer coverage or enrolled in the state marketplace.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported the name of PCHC’s CEO Merrill Thomas.
Health reporter Lynn Arditi can be reached at larditi@thepublicsradio.org
