Southcoast Health Invests to Provide Patients with Exceptional Service, Convenience, and Access

As we reflect on 2021, COVID-19-related care was a major focus and a significant portion of the services we provided, from offering information about vaccine safety, to administering more than 114,000 vaccine doses, to providing skilled and compassionate emergency care for those with severe illness. All of us at Southcoast Health are proud to have been an essential resource to our communities in responding to the pandemic. Almost two years since the pandemic began, we continue to deploy a comprehensive, system-wide response to safely care for our staff, patients and community.

However, our patients’ health needs went well beyond COVID, and so did our care and our commitment. Our mission to be More than medicine means providing patients with exceptional service, convenience, access to highly skilled care providers, clinical technology and state-of-the-art facilities.

We delivered on that mission in 2021 through a number of significant achievements and investments, including:

Expanding Access

• Earning a Massachusetts Department of Public Health Level II Adult Trauma Center designation for St. Luke’s Hospital, making it the first of its kind in the region, and filling a critical need to provide urgent, life-saving care in our community—when every second counts.
• Constructing the Baldwin Makepeace Emergency Center at Tobey Hospital. The expansion and renovation will allow Southcoast to provide the most advanced and personalized emergency care for up to 40,000 patients annually in the greater Wareham area.
• Constructing an Electrophysiology (EP) lab and completing our Cardiac Catheterization Lab renovation at Charlton Memorial Hospital. Our cardiac surgeons and specialists performed more than 6,300 cardiovascular procedures last year, further distinguishing Charlton Memorial as “the heart hospital”… the place where you and your loved ones want to go when dealing with a heart condition or ailment.

Exceptional Care

• Advancing our comprehensive cancer program through improved imaging precision, and advanced treatment capabilities, while treating more than 1,500 cancer patients close to home at our two Southcoast Health Cancer Center locations in Fall River and Fairhaven.
• Adding a state-of-the-art Stryker Mako robot capable of hip and total knee replacement, a laparoscopic higher resolution video system at Charlton Memorial Hospital and at our Dartmouth Surgery Center, and expanding surgical robot technology with a total of three Da Vinci Robots. These enhancements provide our physicians with the most sophisticated surgical technology and equipment in more than 2,100 cases to patients in our region.
• Helping to welcome nearly 3,200 babies into the world through our OB-GYN clinical teams and maternity care programs.

Commitment to Community

• Investing $23 million (2020) in Community Benefits Programs and Services, fulfilling our commitment and leadership in supporting vulnerable populations in our community. These include nutritional programs for patients with food insecurity, programs to support families working through substance use disorder, and our mobile wellness programs that proactively serves our community, providing vulnerable populations with access to care and wellness education.
• Supporting babies born to mothers with substance use disorder through our New Beginnings program, now in its fifth year.
• Enhancing our facilities, including our primary care offices in Dartmouth and Swansea, and expanding our Endocrinology Clinic in Fall River, which provided specialized endocrinology care to more than 6,200 patients.

Southcoast Health Invests in the community demonstrating commitment

These investments are just a few of the many ways we continue to demonstrate our commitment to our community, ensuring you and your family have timely and convenient access to exceptional comprehensive care close to home when you need it.

As we all look toward 2022 with hopeful optimism for an end to the pandemic, our commitment to the health and wellness of our entire community remains resolute. From all of us at Southcoast Health – especially our heroic frontline workers who have relentlessly battled this pandemic for nearly two years – thank you for your continued support, understanding and efforts to remain healthy through vaccination, masking and testing. We are grateful for all of you. We are so proud to call this region our home.

To learn more about how Southcoast Health invests in our community, please visit https://www.southcoast.org or follow us on social media by clicking the links below.