Good Samaritan hospital patients had no TV for almost a week in Brockton

BROCKTON — As Steward Health Care closes hospitals and delays the sales of others, patients at Good Samaritan Medical Center faced another indignity: no TV in their rooms for nearly a week.

One Brocktonian told The Enterprise that a family member was stuck staring at the walls since last Tuesday. The paper agreed not to release the person's name since the relative is still there.

A Steward representative confirmed that television service was down at the medical center. "The system had a brief downtime and is up and running now," said Deborah Chiaravalloti, the regional marketing and communications lead for the company's north region, in an email sent late Monday afternoon.

The person who reported the outage said the relative's TV was still not working Monday night. By Tuesday morning, however, it was back on.

The Steward representative did not say what caused the gap in service.

Some Good Sam rooms have no TVs on purpose

At least 16 beds at the 224-bed hospital don't have televisions. That's on purpose, however. Beds in what is now the 4B-medical surgery unit used to be for behavioral health, a patient safety inspector appointed by the bankruptcy court mentioned in her first report . Such rooms are carefully designed to lower the chance a patient might attempt suicide or pull the TV from the wall. "The staff told the Ombudsman's representative that patients don't mind this because they typically use their phones or an iPad to watch TV or stream movies," the watchdog wrote.

Steward started small in Boston but grew to a network of more than 30 hospitals nationwide and around the world. The for-profit company has filed for protection from its creditors. Steward is trying to sell its hospitals, but onerous leases from the real-estate trust that bought the land and buildings on which they sit have limited the pool of buyers, experts say.

Comcast claims Steward owes it at least $198,748

The bankruptcy filing sparked a mad dash as creditors jockey to be first in line to get paid. A search of Steward creditors for television providers and cable operators showed that on Tuesday, cable giant Comcast claimed Steward owned $198,748 as of June 18. The filing does not give a total for any unpaid Comcast bills after June 18.

Send your news tips to reporter Chris Helms by email at CHelms@enterprisenews.com or connect on X at @HelmsNews .

This article originally appeared on The Enterprise: Good Samaritan hospital patients had no TV for almost a week in Brockton