How small towns pay the price when rural hospitals stop delivering babies - Entrepreneur Generations

Minnesota Public Radio map; click the image to enlarge it

Struggling rural hospitals are increasingly cutting obstetric services, partly because there are fewer rural babies being born these days, partly because it's difficult to attract OBs to rural areas, and partly because such services are expensive to provide and insure. Legal costs are high, too: childbirth-related incidents are the fifth-largest source of malpractice claims.

What all that adds up to: Fewer than half of rural counties have a hospital where a woman can deliver a baby these days, and that's caused big problems for communities and families still living in rural areas, especially those who are poorer, minorities, or depend on public assistance programs, Catharine Richert reports for Minnesota Public Radio News.

Richert zeroes in on the trend's impact in rural Minnesota. In Grand Marais, for example, near the state's northeastern corner, a pregnant woman and her husband had to drive four hours southwest to Duluth in the middle of the night during a blizzard when her water broke. There was a hospital in Grand Marais, but it stopped delivering babies in 2015.

"The number of hospitals in the state offering birth services fell by nearly 18 percent between 2000 and the start of 2015. Rural Minnesota has been hit the hardest: 15 of the state's rural hospitals stopped delivering babies in that time — a nearly 38 percent decline," Richert reports. 

The decrease in rural birth services has increased stress for pregnant women and their partners. "One recent University of Minnesota study found a huge jump in anxiety when the Grand Marais and Ely, Minn., hospitals stopped providing labor and delivery services in the summer of 2015," Richert reports. "Women who received prenatal care locally reported a tenfold increase in anxiety from 1990 to 2016, the year following the closures."

Some respondents in the UM study reported feeling like second-class citizens, and felt that the government did not care as much about rural residents, Richert reports.

The lack of birthing services isn't the only problem for parents of newborns in rural areas: parents have a hard time accessing certain medical services for infants that are commonly available in urban areas. Matt Tyler, a forester who lives in Grand Marais, said he and his partner Erin Petz had to take their newborn to Duluth to treat his jaundice, but their car broke down before they could get there. "There is a big gulf" between the availability of health care in urban and rural areas, he told Richert. "If we want our rural communities to be strong and to carry on, that gulf needs to get closed somewhat, because otherwise these communities are going to die if there's no way to have babies here."

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2RmVASm How small towns pay the price when rural hospitals stop delivering babies - Entrepreneur Generations

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