Multiple members of a board overseeing Saint Francis Hospital have resigned, according to a spokesperson for the hospital’s parent company, Trinity Health of New England.

The resignations came after reports of serious patient safety and quality concerns at Saint Francis, including an incident in 2026 that left a patient dead.

Trinity Health of New England spokesperson Stephanie Valickis said in a statement that the resignations were from a locally-based body, known as the hospital’s “community board,” which plays a separate role from Trinity Health of New England’s governing board, which oversees all five hospitals in the system. 

Saint Francis Hospital’s community board “serves in an advisory capacity,” Valickis said. 

The chair of that board, John Kinney, who also served on Trinity Health of New England’s governing board, resigned from both positions.

Neither Kinney nor his fellow board members contacted for this story responded to requests for comment. Valickis did not respond to follow-up questions regarding how many board members resigned or their reasons for doing so.

In a statement shared by Valickis, Trinity Health of New England Board Chair Walter Harrison said, “My fellow board members and I have seen the Saint Francis team make real progress over the past several months. We remain confident in Saint Francis Hospital’s future and in its partnership with the leadership team.” 

Trinity Health of New England, which has three short-term acute care hospitals in Connecticut, is owned by Trinity Health, a $25 billion Michigan-based health system that touts itself as “one of the largest not-for-profit, faith-based healthcare systems in the nation.” The organization operates in 23 states and includes more than 90 hospitals across the country.

State Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, said he’d spoken with several of the Saint Francis Hospital community board members and was told that an “overwhelming majority” of the board’s 11 members resigned during a meeting on Tuesday.

Anwar said he understands they resigned over concerns that the parent company, Trinity Health, is not prepared to invest the resources to make necessary improvements to Saint Francis. (Valickis didn’t address reasons for the resignations in her comments to The Connecticut Mirror.)

“It is my understanding that they do trust the leadership of the hospital and the healthcare system in Connecticut, but they are extremely concerned that the leadership is only as good as the amount of funding and investment that Trinity provides,” Anwar said.

Anwar said he thinks the hospital’s characterization of the locally-based body as a “community board” is an attempt to downplay the significance of the resignations. He said he wasn’t aware of the hospital using that term in the past.

A March 2025 announcement from the hospital referred to the group as its “Board of Directors” and did not mention the term “community board.”

On Wednesday morning, a page on the health system’s website titled “Board of Directors” included a list of the board members for Trinity Health of New England Corp., as well as lists of locally-based “directors” and “trustees” for each individual hospital in the system. That page has since been updated to remove the lists for each individual hospital. 

Valickis did not respond to a question about why the page had been updated.

Saint Francis Hospital has in recent years struggled with serious shortcomings when it comes to patient care, records show.

Since January 2023, the hospital has been issued nine findings of “immediate jeopardy” — a situation in which the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services determines that the provider “has placed the health and safety of recipients in its care at risk for serious injury, serious harm, serious impairment, or death.” 

An immediate jeopardy, or “IJ,” is the most serious quality and safety finding CMS can issue to a hospital. In 2026 alone, Saint Francis has received three immediate jeopardy citations. 

The hospital entered into a consent order with the state in September 2024, committing to allow an independent consultant to assess its progress on staffing and safety. That consent order was still in effect as of last month.

The Connecticut Department of Public Health entered into another consent order with Saint Francis in July, which stated that it “remains concerned that prior remediation efforts have not resulted in sustained compliance across all cited areas.”

In recent months, Trinity Health of New England has acknowledged the problems at Saint Francis. In April, the health system replaced its president and CEO with Steven Hanks. Robert Roose was named interim president of Saint Francis Hospital and now serves as president of acute care for the system.

Hanks, who also leads Trinity Health New York, replaced former Trinity Health of New England president and CEO Montez Carter. Roose replaced Valerie Powell-Stafford at Saint Francis.

Both Hanks and Roose are physicians and longtime employees of Trinity Health. The pair signed a full-page ad that appeared in the Hartford Courant on a Sunday in July in which they acknowledged Saint Francis’ lagging performance and pledged to address the problems with safety and quality.

Valickis said in a statement that over $20 million has been spent in the past three months alone for capital investments in Saint Francis’s technology and equipment. During a tour of the hospital last month, Roose said Saint Francis could expect to receive investments from Trinity Health of “tens of millions of dollars every year over the course of the next several years.”