Baystate Health looks to make difference for healthcare in Western Massachusetts…
I grew up in Springfield, in the hospitals that would one day become Baystate Health. On Saturday mornings, I sometimes accompanied my father, Dr. Alvin Keroack, on his rounds. I absorbed a bit of what he and my mother – a nurse at Springfield Hospital (now Baystate Medical Center) – had learned about healthcare and the human condition. Like everyone else, I look back on those days as simpler times. In fact, life then was complicated, too. Many of the patients in my parents’ care coped with the same stressors that challenge our families, friends, and neighbors today – factors that we now call, social determinants of health.