The state’s health and human services secretary spent Monday meeting with Pioneer Valley health care professionals as part of the Public Health Excellence Tour, allowing him to see firsthand the Healey-Driscoll administration’s investment in local and rural public health shared-service hubs through Public Health Excellence grants.
Dr. Kiame Mahaniah made stops in Orange, Gill and Amherst as part of the tour, visiting the Orange Innovation Center and the Health Center Plaza before going to Gill Town Hall and the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
At the Orange Innovation Center, Mahaniah learned about the North Quabbin Health Collaborative — made up of Orange, New Salem, Warwick, Wendell and Petersham — that is housed there before heading down the road to the plaza on New Athol Road, where the Community Health Center of Franklin County has one of its locations. He was given a tour of the facilities alongside state Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, and state Rep. Susannah Whipps, I-Athol.
“Being in western Mass., today I saw firsthand the power of our Public Health Excellence grants. Every day, shared-service models are helping to keep communities safe and healthy,” Mahaniah said in a statement after his tour. “I am grateful to all of the public health leaders I met on this trip from Orange to Gill to Amherst serving their communities through services ranging from restaurant and food truck inspections to vaccine clinics and public health nursing.”
The Community Health Center of Franklin County was inundated with more than 600 new patients when North Quabbin Family Physicians in Athol closed in February, following the sudden death of Dr. Donald E. Mruk.
“You folks really stepped up, and there was a lot of calls to our offices with people concerned,” Whipps said to Dr. Allison van der Velden, the Community Health Center of Franklin County’s CEO.
The second stop was the pharmacy, which opened in March. Whipps and van der Velden said it has been particularly helpful following the closure of the Walgreens in Athol as well as Athol Family Pharmacy. Mahaniah said he was surprised to hear Walgreens closed in an area like the North Quabbin region.
“I think they had a lot of business, but it wasn’t profitable,” van der Velden replied.
“I thought Athol Family Pharmacy was going to hang around longer,” Whipps added.
Van der Velden said the Community Health Center’s pharmacy is “almost breaking even.”
Then the tour went to the plaza’s dental practice. Whipps, a business owner and seventh-generation Athol resident, stressed the need for community members to help their own. Van der Velden said local health care providers compete for staffing but not for profits.
Gill
After the visit to Orange, Mahaniah headed to Gill for a talk with the Franklin Regional Council of Governments’ Cooperative Public Health Service, a shared municipal service with 15 member towns, including Gill. The Cooperative Public Health Service handles permitting, licensing and inspections, along with other health and regulatory services.
Mahaniah was joined by Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein, Director of Health Policy and Strategic Initiatives at the Executive Office of Health and Human Services Eliza Lake, FRCOG and Cooperative Public Health Service staff, Comerford, and Gill Town Administrator Ray Purington, who discussed the benefit to the shared service for member towns.
In fiscal year 2026, the Cooperative Public Health Service received $474,736 in state Public Health Excellence grants, which helps cover its various positions.
The discussion was guided by staff, who shared how the Cooperative Public Health Service works with member towns, highlighting the unique feature of acting as the permitting, licensing, inspecting and code enforcement body across the region.
Cooperative Public Health Service Oversight Board member Barbara Killeen explained the service helps small towns whose boards of health are largely made up of volunteers, and can become “inundated” with state regulation changes and the need for on-the-ground services such as inspections. The service helps these boards and works collaboratively with the towns to bring “expertise” and “impartiality” to the work, Killeen said.
“Being small is great, until it isn’t,” she remarked.
The discussion largely centered on how the Cooperative Public Health Service can support small communities and their residents, related both to vaccine clinics, public health nurse visits to senior living facilities, working with homeowners on correcting code violations, and inspections of community events and recreational camps.
By the end of the hour-long discussion, Mahaniah shared his takeaway, reflecting on balancing the impact of larger state systems and the impact individuals have on their communities in the realm of public health.
“Sometimes it’s great when you have these big systems where you can put a lot of effort into it, but sometimes we forget about the efficiency of having somebody who knows the community, knows individuals and who’s able to cross all these different parts of people’s lives that are important,” he said.
As for the structure of the Cooperative Public Health Service, Mahaniah said the design of the program is interesting in the way that these small towns are able to organize it. Goldstein voiced a similar sentiment about FRCOG.
“They have demonstrated what it means to come together to share resources,” Goldstein said, “to understand your communities really well, and then reflect back the services that the community is actually asking for.”