Southborough joins 3 towns in health partnership

MMA Innovation Award winner, From The Beacon, February 2025

Over the past few years, a partnership involving Southborough, Boylston, Northborough and Westborough has expanded the public health outreach of the four towns, allowing them to provide more services to a more diverse range of populations.

In 2021, the towns formed the Greater Boroughs Partnership for Health to share nursing, health inspection and epidemiology resources. Working with a Public Health Excellence Grant from the Department of Public Health, the towns sought to improve compliance with public health regulations and standards, expand existing services and create new programs, and improve community outreach.

Based in Northborough, the public health partnership has helped small towns facing limited staffing, resources and ability to do community outreach, said Chelsea Malinowski, chair of the Southborough Board of Health.

Before Southborough joined the group in 2021, she said, the town of about 10,000 residents struggled to meet the varied requirements of a municipal health department, a workload that includes septic and soil testing, restaurant and school cafeteria inspections, and vaccinations and infectious disease control — not to mention other aspects of protecting a community’s physical and mental health.

“So that’s why we were excited about it, because it gave us some stability, even though [the program] didn’t live in our town,” Malinowski said. “It didn’t really matter to us where we were getting those supports from. We just knew we needed the support.”

The grant funding the partnership is expected to be renewed every three years over a 12-year period, and the partnership has been receiving about $300,000 each year so far. The funds cover two nursing positions, a health inspector and an epidemiologist for the collaboration, though each town is still expected to maintain its own staffing. An eight-member advisory board, consisting of a primary and secondary member from each town, meets every other month.

“These resources have been pivotal in improving environmental health inspections, infectious disease investigations, and community health data,” said Isabella Caruso, Northborough’s health and human services director. “By working together, we’ve built a stronger, more effective public health infrastructure than we could have achieved independently.”

So far, the towns have published a food resource guide and a guide for maternal, child and family health; organized large-scale vaccination clinics and administered more than 16,000 doses of COVID vaccine; run a drive-through flu clinic capable of vaccinating up to 500 people in less than three hours; installed sunscreen dispensers in parks; created a home-visit program for older residents in need of additional support; and offered monthly CPR and automated external defibrillator training sessions, among other initiatives. They also offer monthly training sessions on the use of Narcan, the overdose-reversing drug.

Through all of these initiatives, the partnership has focused on enhanced public outreach, according to Southborough Health Director Taylor West.

“That’s always a huge thing for me,” West said. “How do we get our message out that we have access to these things, so that we can help people in all four communities?”

The partnership is working on strengthening its maternal, child and family health services, and hopes to start new programming in 2025, envisioning small group classes, groups for new mothers, support groups, breastfeeding support, infant and child CPR training, and infant care services.

“I just think it’s so hard for Massachusetts towns as municipalities to sustain all these services on their own,” Malinowski said. “And I think from a global perspective, or a higher level, anytime that you can save taxpayers money and have a better service, that’s a win.”

For more information about the Greater Boroughs Partnership for Health, please contact Southborough Health Director Taylor West at twest@southboroughma.com.