Two Wisconsin hospitals are the latest in rural America to stop delivering babies

Citing a lack of physicians willing and able to deliver babies, and low birth rates in their areas, a pair of rural hospitals in west-central Wisconsin are eliminating deliveries, Christena T. O’Brien reports for the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram. Memorial Medical Center in Neillsville stopped delivering Saturday, and Rusk County Memorial Hospital in Ladysmith will temporarily halt services on March 2. (Leader-Telegram photo by Steve Kinderman)

About 30 babies are born each year at Memorial, while over the past five years annual births at Rusk have ranged from 47 to 68, O'Brien writes. Both hospitals "will continue to provide pre-and postnatal care and pediatric services and be able to handle emergency deliveries," O'Brien reports, but expectant mothers are being directed to neighboring medical centers for deliveries.

Another issue is the workload, O'Brien writes. In some rural areas, doctors that deliver babies need to be on call at all times, an issue that has scared away many physicians, said Scott Polenz, administrator of Marshfield Clinic’s West District and former CEO of Memorial. He told O'Brien, "We’ve all tried to be everything to everybody, but with rising health care costs . . . I think we’re going to see more and more of these decisions.”

Ed Wittrock, vice president of operations at Mayo Clinic Health System-Chippewa Valley, which operates three clinics, one of which stopped deliveries 10 years ago, told O'Brien, “When you’re delivering babies, you have to be able to have all the resources on hand right now. Ten years ago we were having trouble recruiting family practice physicians who actually were trained in (obstetrics) and wanted to deliver babies ... and that is a problem today, that family practitioners are not all trained to deliver babies, and rural communities tend to have a majority of family practitioners.” (Read more)