One Ohio hospital recently ended their maternity services, another will soon follow suit

An Ohio hospital recently ended their maternity services and another hospital is ending their labor and delivery services later this month. 

OhioHealth’s Shelby Hospital stopped providing maternity services after Feb. 28, and University Hospitals Lake West Medical Center in Willoughby is ending labor and delivery services April 15.

“When an obstetric unit closes there are still people in that community who are getting pregnant and need to give birth,” said Dr. Julia Interrante, a research fellow and statistical lead at the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center. 

Maternal mortality is higher in new mothers than in other industrialized nations and deaths for Black infants nationwide went up over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Infant mortality has gradually gone down overall in the last decade in Ohio, but the infant mortality rate for Black Ohioans is 164% higher than for white Ohioans, according to a recent report from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.

OhioHealth Shelby Hospital 

The number of babies delivered annually at OhioHealth’s Shelby Hospital, a rural hospital, dropped from about 150 to less than 80, said Dr. Gavin Baumgardner, vice president of clinical services for OhioHealth Mansfield Hospital and OhioHealth Shelby Hospital.

“We really made a decision that we could not maintain the same level of quality and competency with our staff and the care there, so we made the difficult decision to end maternity services at Shelby,” Baumgardner said. 

OhioHealth Mansfield Hospital offers maternity services 13 miles away and Baumgardner said many women were already choosing to deliver their babies at the Mansfield hospital even before services ended at the Shelby Hospital. 

OhioHealth started evaluating the maternity services at Shelby about two years ago when the hospital was averaging about 150 deliveries a year, Baumgardner said. 

“The revenue had dropped because of delivering fewer babies and one of the challenges with maternity units is you have to maintain minimum staffing regardless of whether or not we have babies being delivered or not,” Baumgardner said. 

Finances, however, were not a factor in the decision to end maternity services, he said. 

“We made the decision purely based on whether we can maintain the right level of quality moving forward and there was never really a discussion around finances in regards to this particular decision,” Baumgardner said. 

Geography factored into ending maternity services at the Shelby Hospital, he said.

“The factor was it was not truly a healthcare desert or a remote location where it would be unsafe to travel long, long distances to deliver a baby,” Baumgardner said.

OhioHealth Hardin Memorial Hospital and OhioHealth Morrow County Hospital also do not offer maternity services. 

Shutting down maternity services reflects a trend among rural hospitals. About half of rural community hospitals did not provide obstetrics care by 2020, according to the American Hospital Association. At least 89 obstetric units closed in rural hospitals from 2015 to 2019. 

More than 500,000 babies were born to women who live in rural counties, but only seven percent of obstetric providers practice in rural areas, according to the March of Dimes Maternity Care Deserts report from 2022. 

“The people who are most burdened by that closure are the ones that have the fewest resources to be able to travel somewhere else,” Interrante said. 

Lake West