Board votes to keep Labor and Delivery indefinitely

The Bryan W. Whitfield Memorial Hospital board of directors voted unanimously Thursday afternoon to keep the Labor and Delivery unit open indefinitely.

“We voted to keep it open and to continue working on ways to ensure its long-term viability. So it will be open indefinitely,” BWWMH Mike Marshall said of the decision.

The hospital’s OB unit ended up back on the chopping block after finances continued to tighten following shifts in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement.

“We’ve been able to keep that thing open for a long time. Things have gotten so tight with Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement,” Marshall said. “It has just gotten harder and harder to support programs that have a high Medicaid or indigent population.”

Marshall said the hospital has reduced its indigent care visits by 70 percent in recent years. However, there is little the facility can do to reduce Medicare and Medicaid visits.

“We get paid less than our actual cost of providing service. Here it is about 72 to 73 percent of cost to provide services to Medicaid population,” Marshall said.

Furthermore, offsetting the costs associated with the unit is a tenuous prospect given the nature of the population being serviced.

“That’s an area where you can’t really flex your staffing. You’ve got to have a core number of nurses there at all times in case you have a baby that needs to be delivered. With this, you have a base level of staffing there with a base level of expense you can’t flex,” Marshall explained. “In addition to that, you have equipment upgrades that you have to do to stay on top of things from a risk management standpoint.”

When the unit faced potential closure two years ago, the hospital received help from county and municipal entities to help give the OB wing a stay of execution.

“We made some changes back then. We cut about $2 million out of our operating expenses and basically bought two more years of time. With the city and county’s help, we were able to keep it going,” Marshall said. “We’re back at that crossroads. We’re going to do everything we can to keep it open. It’s going to remain open indefinitely while we try to find long-term solutions. There are no short-term solutions. We’re going to have to have the continued support of our board, medical staff, governmental bodies and the community to help us be able to do that. Shop local and use your local hospital, I guess, is the overriding theme.”

The unit delivered some 225 babies last year and is on pace to deliver 218 halfway through the current fiscal year. The five-year high for the unit is 361 babies.

Thursday’s meeting began with a 45-minute open forum session in which the board entertained the views of the nearly two dozen people attendees in support of keeping the unit open.

The hospital now turns its focus to attempting to fund the needs of the Labor and Delivery unit. In the interim, those needs consist of equipment upgrades in the neighborhood of $300,000 that will need to be made within the next six months.

“I think we’ve figured out a way maybe to stretch out some of our existing equipment for a few more months,” Marshall said. “And we’re looking to get some grant money for that.”