Unlike Dunkin’ Donuts outlets, hospitals don’t necessarily mirror population trends. According to the most current figures provided by Bay State hospitals to the American Hospital Directory, staffed beds are relatively plentiful in Berkshire and Hampden counties (which have been bleeding residents in recent years) and relatively scarce in fast-growing southeastern Massachusetts. Hospitals are shrinking in number, and the Massachusetts Hospital Association counts 28 acute-care facilities in the state that have been closed or converted to “other health-care related uses” since 1980. Only two such facilities were in arguably underserved Barnstable, Norfolk, and Plymouth counties, suggesting that the consolidation process does have some relation to demand.

In 2001, average occupancy rates at Massachusetts hospitals varied widely—from 21 percent at Nantucket Cottage Hospital to 90 percent at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington. Other hospitals with low bed-occupancy rates (Harrington General, in Southbridge; North Adams Regional Hospital; Athol Hospital) are also in relatively less-populated regions, and the fact that they cover large geographical areas may make them unlikely candidates for closure. Meanwhile, the most crowded facilities (Faulkner Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, all in Boston) are in densely developed areas where hospital expansion may become prohibitively expensive.

Switching from hospital beds to the doctors who stand beside them, we find a geographic pattern similar to that of hospital beds. According to the state Department of Public Health, there were 18,349 certified physicians on the job in Massachusetts in 2002, and fully 33 percent (or 5,984) of them worked in the city of Boston. Per capita, however, the greatest concentrations of physicians were in the Lahey Clinic’s Burlington, (360 in a town of 22,876). The biggest towns without any doctors were Wareham and East Bridgewater, both in the southeastern part of the state—as is Fairhaven, the biggest town with only one practicing physician.

Sources: American Hospital Directory (www.ahd.com), Massachusetts Hospital Association (www.mhalink.org), Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (www.state.ma.us/dhcfp); Massachusetts Department of Public Health (http://masschip.state.ma.us).