Labor and Delivery to close Feb. 28

Bryan W. Whitfield Memorial Hospital’s Labor and Delivery Unity will close its doors Feb. 28. The decision came from the BWWMH hospital board Wednesday after it became apparent the unit would no longer be sufficiently staffed to adequately provide services.

“One of my concerns in this whole process was our staffing situation. We had gotten one resignation in mid-January. I communicated to our board that if we had anymore, then we were going to have a pretty difficult time staffing the unit. At the end of February, I will have lost 60 percent of my staff on the unit, three out of the five (nurses),” BWWMH Administrator Mike Marshall said. “Labor and Delivery, obviously, is a specialized unit and I don’t have the luxury of just being able to shift a nurse from a med-surge unit. You have to have training that is specific to that area and have appropriate competency levels. We’ve always had a tough time recruiting nurses for that unit. As a matter of fact, in my 10-plus years here, we’ve only recruited one nurse that had OB training. We’ve had to grow our own. With that in mind, we consulted with our liability carrier to talk with them about the situation. After talking with them, the director of nursing and I were trying to hash out our schedule going forward. I communicated to our board last Friday that I felt like the staffing component of our unit was putting us in a position where we would not be able to provide an adequate level of care for the women coming here to deliver. We met (Wednesday) and discussed that some more. (The hospital board) approved my recommendation that we discontinue delivering any babies after the end of this month.”

When the unit closes its doors Feb. 28, there will be some 20 expectant mothers whose deliveries had been scheduled at the hospital in March.

“We have already begun the process of notifying those folks and getting them transitioned to another physician. The positive thing about it is, I believe we have 20 deliveries scheduled in March, 19 are covered by the Medicaid program, so they already have a care management program in place through the Greater Alabama Health Network,” Marshall said. “We should be able to effectively transition those ladies to another physician beginning next week. We had been discussing the possibility with (GAHN) for a while.”

The board voted in Dec. 2013 to close the unit as part of a larger cost-reduction plan that involved the layoff of nearly 40 total hospital employees. Since that time, a ground swell of support to save the L&D department has led to the formation of a task force as well as actions from local politicians ranging from Demopolis Mayor Mike Grayson to the Marengo County Commission, which voted Tuesday to seek a 2-mill tax that would conditionally go to support the unit.

Grayson has scheduled a Town Hall Meeting for Tuesday, Feb. 18 at 5:15 p.m. at Rooster Hall to discuss the Labor and Delivery Unit.

While L&D is closing its doors, Marshall said the hospital board is in favor of a continuation of such efforts.

“Our board was adamant that even though this is a temporary setback, hopefully, that we are going to keep the task force intact. At least that’s what their desire is,” Marshall said. “They were adamant that we keep that group intact and keep on working with the hope that we can come up with a long-term solution for viability and, maybe at some point in time, reopen the unit. There is nothing that says that once you close it, you can’t ever reopen it.”

Marshall is a member of the task force charged with finding a long-term answer for the unit. He characterized the group’s early meetings as “productive.”

“We’re going to keep our equipment and we’ll let the task force continue to work,” Marshall said. “We’ve come up with a list of ideas and issues. We’re going to start working through those at our next meeting. I think they’ve been very productive. We’ve had great participation.”

As for the county’s decision to seek a 2-mill tax, Marshall offered no official comment on the commission’s vote, but did concede that any such county contribution would be helpful.

“We have not had any official communication with the county,” Marshall said in reference to the vote that could produce some $471,000 annually for the unit. Obviously, that is a long, drawn-out process that has to go through several hoops. Certainly any help we would get would be appreciated.”