BWWMH to close Labor and Delivery unit

The Labor and Delivery Unit at Bryan W. Whitfield Memorial Hospital will soon be closing due to budget concerns. BWWMH began informing staffers Wednesday that the unit will be closing in the near future.

“It is going to depend. We have to give the state 30 days notice,” BWWMH Administrator Mike Marshall said of the unit’s expected closing date. “It is going to be a fluid situation. We’re just going to have to play it by ear and see what happens. I would anticipate here in the next couple months we’ll have to shut it down.”

The unit came under fire most recently last spring when low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements continued to take their toll on the hospital’s bottom line, leading an array of other financial factors that put the unit at risk. On April 25, 2013, the BWWMH board voted to keep the unit open.

Since that time, however, the hospital has encountered significant budget constraints that forced the board’s hand.

“As I told my board in December. There are a lot of factors that go into this decision. We had a lot of discussion about Labor and Delivery,” Marshall said. “We put our budget together in late summer and early fall. At the eleventh hour, we had about $636,000 was cut out of our Medicaid disproportionate share money that we didn’t know was going to be cut. In addition to that, with the sequestration cuts we got another $250,000 we were hoping we were not going to have to take in calendar year 2014. But the federal government said those were going to continue. The bottom line is that we had about $900,000 in budget cuts that we have to find a way to offset.”

Offsetting those costs will begin with Labor and Delivery’s closure. It is not known at this time how many job cuts the hospital will have to make and exactly what, if any, other departments will be effected.

“We are far from the only people having to make these kinds of decisions. The LSU Health Sciences Division in Louisiana, a few months ago they’re cutting 2,500 people out of their organization,” Marshall said, referring to a growing list of medical facilities nationwide that have succumb to financial issues. “We’ve lost three hospitals in the state of Alabama this year. Elba’s hospital closed. Chilton Medical Center closed and Florala closed a couple weeks ago. Everybody is just scrambling. In 2010, we had 96 hospitals in the state. Forty-one out of the 96 lost money in 2010. In 2011, 53 out of the 91 lost money. It’s just a bad situation.”