Clinic To Close On Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve will mean a lump of coal for senior citizens who use the Oliver Farnum Senior Health Center. The Central Square-based health facility, operated by the Cambridge Health Alliance, will close that day.

In public meetings, the CHA has cited ongoing budget problems and the inefficiency of operating the center as reasons for shutting the center’s doors.

While patients and other residents have said they are upset that the center will be closing, some said that it will not negatively affect their health care.

“I have the best of care here,” Grace A. Carson said Friday afternoon after an appointment at the health center. Carson, who has been a patient at the health center for the past decade, spoke against its closing at a meeting in October, calling the move “disgusting.”

But she praised the gerontologist who will care for her at another CHA clinic, the Riverside Health Center, and said she did not think that the change would cause her too much inconvenience.

Bruce Sylvester, a former staffer at Harvard Law School, said that the health center closing leaves him “very up in the air,” because he wants to remain with a doctor who based part of his practice at the Oliver Farnum health center.

Sylvester said that he is not yet sure where the doctor will practice in the future.

But Sylvester said that closing the health center made some sense to him.

“I’m told the clinic is hemorrhaging money, [and] if that’s the case, what can CHA do?” Sylvester said.

Patient Leif H. Norderg did lament the fact that his doctor will no longer be located at a clinic attached to the senior center, which is where he spends most of his time.

“I have read a memo describing where else I can go, but it’s not here where I hang out all day,” Norderg said. “My legs are bad. I can barely get [to the Oliver Farnum Senior Center] from two blocks away every day.”

The CHA announced that it would be closing the senior health center earlier this year amid budget woes that precipitated the layoffs of 300 alliance employees beginning in the summer of 2008.

In October, the Massachusetts state secretary of health and human services informed the CHA that the state was cutting the network’s budget by $55 million during the 2009 fiscal year.

According to an e-mailed statement from CHA spokesman Doug Bailey, 1,730 patients use the clinic at the Oliver Farnum Senior Center, and CHA has been contacting them to inform them that they should plan for their future medical care.

Of the 800 patients CHA had reached by Dec. 10, only six had indicated that they would leave the alliance for another healthcare provider, Bailey said.

CHA is a public hospital system that has several locations in the northern Boston metropolitan area. Many of its services are aimed at serving low-income patients, thus making the alliance heavily reliant on state Medicaid funding.

—Staff writer Bora Fezga can be reached bfezga@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Sarah J. Howland can be reached at showland@fas.harvard.edu.