State audit claims 2023 maternity unit closure in Leominster was preventable

 

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State audit claims 2023 maternity unit closure in Leominster was preventable   November 25, 2025 By HALLIE CLAFLIN

A state audit of UMass Memorial Health released earlier this month by Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s office asserts that the health system should have used more than $6 million in COVID relief grants from the state to prevent its maternity unit in Leominster from closing in 2023.

The closure, which UMass Memorial attributed to workforce shortages and declining births, has since left maternity patients farther from a labor and delivery unit – resulting in a number of ambulance and emergency room births – and has strained the region’s emergency medical services, CommonWealth Beacon reported in September.

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The state auditor’s office reviewed UMass Memorial’s activities between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2023, and found that the private, nonprofit health care network in Central Massachusetts could not provide evidence of how it spent $6.2 million in COVID-related grants it received from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) during the investigation period.

The hospital system says the money was used on bonuses for frontline health care workers.

The issue appears to be a spat about accounting records, but it highlights the struggles health providers had during the height of the first COVID waves, when frontline medical personnel were stretched thin, and how the business of health care has made it increasingly difficult to deliver services like maternity care across the state.

UMass Memorial has pushed back on the audit’s findings, arguing that DiZoglio’s office overstepped by attempting to dictate how the hospital network should manage its funds.

Despite UMass Memorial’s claims that the funding was used for bonus payments authorized under the grant agreement, the auditor has maintained that the health care system did not provide accounting records as evidence of those expenditures.

Although UMass Memorial likely will not face consequences, the audit makes several recommendations and encourages the hospital to adopt procedural changes and reassess maternity care in the region.

“By not investing this money in its maternity center workforce, [UMass Memorial] has created a health disparity for its patients, of whom 20 percent are MassHealth members, because of a lack of access to maternity care in the Central Massachusetts region,” the auditor’s report said.

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More Context Two years after the closure of Leominster’s maternity unit, a region is struggling (September 2025)

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