Overview:
The 2025 Baystate Franklin Medical Center Community Health Needs Assessment has identified people experiencing homelessness as a priority population in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region. The assessment reveals that homelessness has risen across all age groups, with a lack of affordable housing and supported housing. The report recommends bringing detox beds to Baystate Franklin, expanding the addiction consult program and training providers in wound care, among other action items.
This is the second part of a two-part series outlining the findings of the 2025 Baystate Franklin Medical Center Community Health Needs Assessment. The first part discussed how food security was identified as a health need to prioritize in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region, joining other regional-focused needs in the areas of maternal and infant health, behavioral health and substance use disorders.
GREENFIELD — People experiencing homelessness were identified as a priority population in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region as part of the 2025 Baystate Franklin Medical Center Community Health Needs Assessment.
Baystate Franklin is a member of the Coalition of Western Massachusetts Hospitals/Insurer, a partnership formed in 2012 that has grown to include 10 hospitals, clinics and insurers in the region. The coalition coordinates resources and activities for conducting Community Health Needs Assessments every three years, and the resulting reports identify coalition-wide health needs and coalition member-identified needs.
As noted within the report’s executive summary, the Baystate Franklin service area continues to face the same prioritized health needs from the 2022 Community Health Needs Assessment, with “persistent inequities” for people of color, immigrants, older adults ages 65 and older, young children and their caregivers, LGBTQ people and low-income individuals. Additionally, Baystate Franklin identified “unhoused people as a priority population for in-depth research,” the report states.
Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG) Director of Public Health Phoebe Walker presented the coalition-wide priority populations and the Baystate Franklin prioritized population during a Zoom discussion on Thursday outlining the report’s findings. She shared that several common themes emerged “in literally every focus group and interview, no matter which population we were talking to,” including a lack of health care access and transportation, mental health needs, economic hardship, and needs for greater technology access and literacy.
Ann Darling, lead writer of the 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment, discussed homelessness, saying it is a “structural problem” impacting the entire county, with impacts rooted in economic dynamics “that are far beyond the control of those individuals.” In the presentation, data from the Three County Continuum of Care’s Point-in-Time Counts from 2020 to 2024 indicates a rise in homelessness across all age groups, with 961 people experiencing homelessness in 2024 in Franklin, Hampshire and Berkshire counties, compared to 591 in 2020. Specifically in Franklin County, the 2024 Point-in-Time Count found 252 people sleeping in shelters or outside.
“The inadequacy of housing assistance, the recent changes at the state level to the family shelter system and cuts to supportive services locally, as well as national-level programs like [the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program] and fuel assistance, and rental assistance, it resulted and will result in more and more people becoming unhoused,” Darling explained.
The report details a lack of 3,000 affordable housing units in Franklin County. Supported housing is also mentioned as being in need for people who require “emotional and practical help to gain and maintain stability,” and there are few options for supported housing for people leaving detox or addiction treatment.
On top of the need for housing, the report points out that a lack of trust around systems of care runs deep within the homeless population, and should be taken into account when developing resources.
The action items section of the report shares how bringing detox beds back to Greenfield at Baystate Franklin would help, alongside an expanded addiction consult service and training for providers in wound care.
Other action items include offering more mobile outreach to those facing homelessness, having more trauma-informed staff who are trained in harm reduction working in medical settings and involving people who have lived experience with homelessness in developing systems of care. Another recommendation suggests that Baystate Franklin and other local medical practices use Three County Continuum of Care’s Coordinated Entry, where “people’s situation is triaged and resources for housing and other needs are found” when a patient is admitted to the care facility.
To read the full 2025 Baystate Franklin Community Health Needs Assessment, visit tinyurl.com/bdbfbryd.