Every year, more than 55,000people in New Jersey rely on one healthcare network — the North Hudson Community Action Corp. (NHCAC) — for their primary care needs.
More than half of those patients live in Hudson County, particularly the northern half, and survive on low salaries. Many are immigrants. If there was any doubt about its essentialitybefore 2020, NHCAC was a regional lifeline during the coronavirus pandemic.
Next year, it will have a new leader for the first time in more thana decade. Joan Quigley, NHCAC’s president since 2013,announced this week that she will retire at the end of the year.
Quigley’s retirement not only marks a moment of transition for NHCAC, but the end of her decades-long career in public service, through the state assembly and health care administration.
The only work she plans to continue come the new year is her weekly column in The Jersey Journal.
“I’ve been fortunate,” she said, noting that she’s now spent 50 years working in health care. “I like a challenge. I’ve enjoyed most of them.”
The year that Quigley departs from NHCAC, the network will turn 60. For its first 30 years, it provided social services, beginning with the early childhood educational program Head Start. Those continue to this day and include housing, career and immigration services, but in 1994 it fully expanded into health care and never looked back.
Nearly half of NHCAC’s adult patients are uninsured, while another 42% are insured by Medicaid. NHCAC connects with patients at 10 locations in Hudson, Bergen and Passaic counties, working under the principle that preventative care is a worthy investment for patients of all incomes. Its Federally Qualified Health Centers allow NHCAC to access federal funding and additional Medicaid reimbursements as it supports populations that are otherwise underserved.
When Quigley was hired to take the helm of the organization, she was working as a vice presidentat Hoboken University Medical Center.She had helped ensureit remained open even as it sunk into deep debt.
North Hudson was new for her. She was raised in Jersey City and that was the area she had represented in the state assembly from 1994 to 2011.
Her nerves faded as she found a steady organization and camaraderie among her new colleagues, she said.
Even the strongest of organizations couldn’t prevent a global disaster. Within seven years,she would face the biggest challenge of her time at NHCAC when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, with rates particularly high in North Hudson.
But she doesn’t shudder when she thinks back to that time. Instead, she is proud and said she felt proud even at the time because of the quick and sweeping responses to the pandemic.
“We were in a unique position to help people,” she explained. “We wanted to do testing right away and of course there was no vaccine at that point, but at least we could let people know whether or not they had it.”
When colleagues and patients were wary of the new vaccine, she was the first to put her arm out for a jab, eager to serve as a role model.
“Then every place we could go to vaccinate people we would,” she said. “We went from town to town to town. In West New York we went to the police station. In Weehawken we went to the first aid station. In Kearny we went to the garage of the water department. Coldest place I’ve ever been in my life.”
She calls saving the Hoboken hospital, then called St. Mary Hospital,the biggest challengeof her health care career. The threat of its closure came after St. Francis Hospital’s shuttering in Jersey City, a decision that wasn’t solely Quigley’s when she was in its administration, but that she said she nevertheless bore much of the public blame for.
Saving St. Mary involved exhausting nearly every option and approaching failure before managing to have a new law drafted to allow the city to take over the hospital.
Now, as she sees the hospital struggling to operate under CarePoint Health’s leadership, she grows emotional. Her NHCAC patients need local hospitals in addition to the services NHCAC provides, she emphasized, often just for basic procedures like an appendix removal.
“We can’t remove that appendix, but they don’t need to (leave the county to) go to Barnabas or Hackensack to get their appendix removed,” she said. “That’s a fairly simple thing.”
Quigley’s office is decorated with miniature police cars she’s collected during her travels and plaques she said she’s ready to store away in boxes.
She’s already bought the dress for her retirement party, but isn’t quite sure how it will feel to transition from working a seven-day job to only being a columnist.
Slowing down, she said, will be tough.
“I’m happiest when my adrenaline is pumping,” Quigley said. “That’s the way I’ve always been.”
