In a state that prides itself on having some of the best health care in the world, two communities are bracing for the closure this weekend of community hospitals that serve hundreds of thousands of people -- though activists said they're not giving up on getting them to reopen their doors.

"I'm telling everybody to chew more carefully," Eleanor Guvazzi of West Groton said Wednesday. "It's a very, very frightening situation to look at your babies across the dining room table and know that if they choke on something, you can't get them anywhere to help in time."

Guvazzi, wearing a tricorn hat and carrying an American flag, joined protestors outside the State House under the beating sun Wednesday afternoon to protest the closing of Carney Hospital in Dorchester and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, her local hospital.

Nashoba Valley saved her son's and mother's lives, she said, and if the hospital closes the next closest emergency room is 40 minutes away, when there's no traffic.

"We are in danger. We are at risk," she said, declaring that access to health care is a human and American right, pointing to her patriotic attire.

Sonia Lipson, a nurse practitioner at Daniel Driscoll - Neponset Health Center, half a mile from the Carney in Dorchester, said she only got instructions Tuesday about where to redirect her patients who go to the hospital for specialized care like radiology, cardiology and orthopedics.

"We've been calling for weeks and weeks asking. No one seems to have any idea what's going on. The neighborhood is really in turmoil at this point," Lipson said.

As the crisis at Steward Health Care hospitals has been unfolding over the past several months, officials and providers have been critical of the system's CEO, Ralph de la Torre, and other hospital administrators. But protestors at Wednesday's rally also pointed fingers at the state, and specifically, Gov. Maura Healey's administration.

"Governor Healey, where are you?" they chanted.

Elected officials at the event called on the administration to use a similar playbook to the plan they've laid out for St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton.

Healey, Health and Human Services Secretary Kate Walsh, and DPH Commissioner Robbie Goldstein have repeatedly said they have no ability to keep the pair of facilities open — though they announced earlier this month that the state would move to seize St. Elizabeth's by eminent domain to help transfer it to Boston Medical Center.

"The Healey-Driscoll administration shares the frustration of communities and staff regarding Steward's planned closures of Carney and Nashoba Valley Hospitals. Unfortunately, these hospitals did not receive qualified bids to continue operating," a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

Though the state did not receive any "qualified" bids, South Boston Sen. Nick Collins said there are still interested parties who want to buy the Carney and Nashoba Valley — and pointed out that the administration found money to support the transition of five other Steward hospitals.

"There are interested parties, and they just want the same deal the others have had," Collins told the News Service, declining to say who those interested parties are. "State health officials should do exactly what they did with St. Elizabeth's, taking the property with eminent domain, offering bridge funding and capital resources up front to get the facilities up to snuff."

Healey's plan to rescue the five bankrupt Steward Health Care hospitals could cost $700 million by 2027, according to The Boston Globe. Though they haven't released the details of the financial plan of the bailout, EOHHS Secretary Kate Walsh said they would advance some of the funds the hospitals would receive in the future by caring for MassHealth patients to the hospitals in advance.

Collins said that when the Carney's closure was first announced due to the lack of qualified bids, "at that point in the conversation, there were no state resources offered to transition."

Sen. Nick Collins (center) co-hosts a rally Aug. 28, 2024 protesting the closures of the Carney Hospital and Nashoba Valley Medical Center.

Sen. Ed Kennedy, who represents Pepperell and Dunstable near Nashoba Valley Hospital, similarly said Tuesday that he felt there were opportunities for the state to find money to save the two community hospitals.

"If funding was going to be the major roadblock, I think it doesn't need to be," Kennedy said.

Boston City Councillor John FitzGerald, who represents Dorchester, got the crowd riled up at Wednesday's rally.

"All we're asking is for a fair chance from the governor, from the state, that every other hospital at Steward has gotten that chance, except for us and Nashoba. And we know we have operators willing to come in, and we've got a business model that can show the hospital can be profitable again," FitzGerald said. "So that's all we're asking here today. It's just a fair shot. Give us the opportunity you've given the other hospitals."

He added, to cheers, "We're giving $700 million to keep them open. What's $750?"

Sen. Jamie Eldridge asked the Healey administration to "meet us halfway."

"And I have to say — it shouldn't have to take elected officials like Councilor Flynn, Councilor Louijeune, Rep. Scarsdale, Rep. Sena, myself -- it shouldn't take us as elected officials, all this effort to get potential hospital operators and the administration to meet halfway and offer the money to keep these hospitals open, and keep them open for both regions. But that's what it's taking," Eldridge said.

Haris Hardaway, a Dorchester resident who is challenging Rep. Russell Holmes for his seat representing the 6th Suffolk District, filed a civil complaint with the Attorney General's office earlier this month against Steward for allegedly violating Black and Latino Boston residents' civil rights by closing the hospital that serves the city's most diverse communities.

The complaint also accuses the state of not stepping in to stop the closure, or enforcing its own law requiring 120 days between the announcement and closure of a hospital, according to reporting from the Dorchester Reporter.

"Why do we have a community with more than 150,000 Black and Latino residents, with a hospital that's about to close? Make it make sense," Hardaway said. "We are here to tell Steward Health Care and this administration that we deserve equal care."

Some of the activists called for state officials to save the hospitals by tapping the state's $8.8 billion rainy day fund. Draws on that fund are permissible for "any event which threatens the health, safety or welfare of the people," but so far the administration has shown no appetite for tapping into that source to address the Steward crisis.

"These are people's jobs, and these are families that we are saying $8 billion in a rainy day fund are not good enough for," Hardaway said.

A Department of Public Health Incident Command center has been planning to support displaced patients and providers, according to EOHHS.

The department said this work includes meeting with hospitals, community health centers and others who can offer services to patients following the closure; supporting the relocation of primary care to neighboring medical office buildings; working with emergency medical services, local fire departments and ambulances to address the impact of the closures on the additional time that transport will take to other facilities; and making transportation options available to communities to maintain access to services in other places.

Collins said he spoke with an elderly woman from Dorchester earlier this week whose medical care is now being redirected to the South Shore for some services, though she doesn't drive, and to other areas of Boston for others.

"This person's in her 80s, multiple comorbidities, and now -- she doesn't drive -- is being asked to go to different counties to go get services. That's going to be the ripple effect," he said.

EOHHS also says Incident Command is facilitating the opening of geriatric psychiatry beds at Good Samaritan Hospital in Brockton to help offset the loss of these beds at the Carney and Nashoba Valley, and creating and publishing an interactive map showing where urgent care centers and retail clinics are located across state.

They're also working on publishing an interactive hospital capacity dashboard that tracks patient activity, as other hospitals are already dealing with the effects of overloaded patient capacity following news of the hospital closures.

"At Carney, from the moment a patient comes into the ED to the moment they see the surgeon or specialist they need, to the time they get booked for a surgery, it's all very fast," Amy Zhang, an anesthesiologist at the Carney, told the News Service. "And that's the beauty of a small interconnected community hospital. But now those patients are getting in line in an already overcrowded big hospital. This is going to have a major ripple effect on other hospitals in the area."

With the two Steward hospitals slated to close on Aug. 31, FitzGerald said he and activists will keep fighting.

"The 31st is approaching fast, the date that the doors may shut for a time, but we're not going to keep them shut forever," he said. "We're going to get them back open."