The Worcester Railers are supporting local caregivers in honor of National Nurses Month. Team members handed out 500 flowers Tuesday to nurses at three UMass Memorial Health campuses in Worcester. They also included a voucher for game tickets for next season and a free car wash from ScrubaDub.

In Worcester, UMass Memorial Children’s Medical Center is the only hospital-level provider between Boston and Springfield. But it’s located in a region of the state with the highest population growth, which means there are a lot of children under 18, Worcester Medical Director Dr. Michael Hirsh said in an interview.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Members of the UMass Memorial medical team were slimed Thursday as part of an event to mark Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day.

Staff sat in the slime seat, giving patients in the children’s medical center a chance to smile and laugh as slime was poured all over them.

“At about 99 percent of the hospitals in the country, they come in for a bronchoscopy, they have a biopsy and then the diagnosis takes about a week or so,” said Mark Maxfield, MD, a thoracic surgeon at UMass Memorial Health. “Afterwards, they come back and have a meeting with the surgeon to talk about surgery and then they have to go schedule the surgery and wait another two weeks or three weeks or four weeks.”

As the public health emergency declaration in Massachusetts is set to end on May 11, UMass Memorial Health in Worcester is poised to update its masking policy, which will make masking optional in most settings throughout the healthcare system. Masks will continue to be required for healthcare providers in the emergency departments, the oncology clinics, bone marrow transplant unit, oncology infusion center, and with transplant patients, according to an email from UMass Memorial President and CEO Dr. Eric Dickson sent to staff on Thursday.

As of May 5, Tamara Lundi is transitioning out of her role as President of Community Healthlink (CHL), which is the mental health and addiction recovery agency affiliated with UMass Memorial Health. Gordon Benson, Vice President for Adult Outpatient Services at CHL, will serve as Interim President while we conduct a search for a  permanent person for this important system role.

UMass Memorial Health CEO Eric Dickson, MD, MHCM, details the innovative ways in which the Massachusetts health system has broken down the barriers of care for the communities it serves.

With Massachusetts being an expansion state, UMass Memorial Health has always made significant efforts toward Medicaid enrollment, said Dr. Dickson. Now those efforts will intensify during the redetermination process. 

UMass Memorial Health president and CEO Dr. Eric Dickson said COVID-19 was and still is unchartered territory. People weren't sure what to do, or what was coming ahead. "In emergency medicine, we train in disaster medicine," he said. "The first rule in disaster medicine is you have to put someone in charge and empower them to make decisions and I think that was lacking.”