Maternity wards are shuttering across the US during the pandemic

[Jilly_in_VA]

This wave of closures has been building for years, but it appears to be accelerating during the pandemic. It could make birth even more dangerous in the US, which already sees far more deaths per capita among infants and pregnant women than comparably wealthy countries. And during the first year of the pandemic, the number of maternal deaths in the United States rose sharply. Researchers from the University of Minnesota have found when a labor and delivery department closes, there tend to be more emergency deliveries and more preterm births, which are the leading cause of infant mortality.

The losses are concentrated primarily in rural areas and communities of Black and Hispanic Americans, who are already less likely to have easy access to all kinds of health care services, including obstetrics. Before the recent closures, more than half of the rural counties in the United States already didn’t have a nearby hospital where babies could be delivered.

The decision to close a maternity ward is never simple. Hospitals that have closed their obstetrics (OB) departments in the past two years cite various factors, including declining birthrates. Some say they cannot find enough physicians and nurses to deliver babies, which would make it unsafe to continue offering those services.

But the pandemic looms over each of these closures. In public hearings, hospitals have pointed to the shortage of doctors, nurses, and health care workers they experienced during Covid-19 to justify their decisions. Sometimes, they have temporarily suspended services because of pandemic-related absences, only to later make the closure permanent. Pandemic relief funding that has helped stabilize hospitals’ finances is also starting to run out.

Some hospitals argue that these closures are not financially motivated, but labor and delivery services are not a moneymaker for them. More than 40 percent of births in the United States are covered by Medicaid, and the program’s low reimbursement rates have been cited in the past to explain a hospital’s decision to close its OB department.

https://www.vox.com/22923432/maternity-wards-hospitals-covid-19-pandemic
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More dumb moves caused by the privatization of medicine, further making the US a s-hole country

[Hugin]

1. I know many nurses to whom obstetrics is their dream job.

So, it is not them driving this.

[hlthe2b]

2. Ensuring adequate prenatal care could/should allow for more use of nurse midwives outside

of hospitals and even home births, if an adequate risk assessment is conducted. But, you can't have one without the other and our system pretty much ensures both are lacking (but for differing reasons).

Add a reluctance to allow for Obstetric telemedicine consults in some rural hospitals and clinics, the politics around women's gynecological and obstetric care (i.e., birth control and abortion), and that as a result fewer want to consider OB as a specialty.

It is a coming storm that was readily predicted decades ago.

[CrispyQ]

3. We'll force you to carry your pregnancy to term but we won't provide a safe means to do so. -nt

[crickets]

4. This is what happens when healthcare stops being about medical needs of the community

and becomes a for-profit venture looking out for the bottom line. When there's no money in providing a maternity ward, *poof* it goes away. Gee, hypothetical fetuses are so darned important in the courtroom. What changed between there and the hospital when it comes to real fetuses, hmm?

Another way of looking at it is that women are considered second class citizens. Just "too much trouble."

For instance: you gotta sudden emergency penis problem? We don't handle penis problems here. The penis problems occur so infrequently that we feel it's impossible to keep our skills up to par, so you'll have to take your penis problem 30 minutes down the road. You say the trip was so long your penis fell off before you could get there? That's too bad. Your penis problem is not our problem. There's just no money in it.

Does not compute.

It's outrageous that pregnant women who live in a community with a hospital are turned away. If you are a hospital, you should be delivering babies. It's a basic part of being a hospital.

[Jilly_in_VA]

5. EXACTLY!

Healthcare is all about the needs of the insurance companies. It's not even about the doctors any more. I have no idea why anyone would even want to be a doctor these days.