By TESS VRBIN | Arkansas Advocate
Another rural Arkansas labor and delivery unit closed its labor and delivery unit Friday, leaving pregnant south Arkansans having to drive nearly an hour for the closest hospital to give birth.
The maternity ward at the Ouachita County Medical Center in Camden closed after hospital administrators concluded that keeping it open “was no longer feasible,” hospital CEO Glenda Harper said Friday afternoon. Harper said last year that the ward “does not make money at this point.”
The decision to close the ward exacerbates the challenges for patients and providers in a region where places to give birth were already scarce. Paramedics have seen an uptick in the number of deliveries being performed in ambulances.
Harper has been CEO of the hospital since August and hoped to keep the labor and delivery unit open despite it losing money every month, she said.
However, the unit only delivered 119 babies last year, falling short of the goal of delivering 200 babies per year in order to justify keeping it open, Harper said. The hospital rarely exceeded 200 births per year since 2015, and it also struggled to retain obstetric nurses, she said.
The unit’s closure “reflects the immense challenge hospitals face when reimbursement rates from all payors do not keep pace with the rising costs of providing care,” the Arkansas Hospital Association said in a statement Friday.
The Ouachita County Medical Center closed its intensive care unit in late 2025 for similar reasons: low patient volume and difficulty staffing the department, Harper said.
The closest hospitals with labor and delivery units to Camden are in El Dorado, a roughly 40-minute drive, and Arkadelphia, roughly an hour’s drive.
Camden’s hospital is the seventh in Arkansas to close its labor and delivery unit since 2020. Among the other six is the hospital in Warren, an hour’s drive from Camden.
The closure leaves only 32 hospitals in 22 of Arkansas’ 75 counties with labor and delivery units.
Amanda Warren-Newton, president of the Arkansas Ambulance Association and owner of Columbia County Ambulance Service, said she’s “working to elevate the competency” of paramedics to care for patients and their babies before and after birth because of the shortage of delivery units, she said. Columbia County borders Ouachita County to the southwest.
Republican Sen. Matt Stone of Camden said Friday that the Ouachita County Medical Center’s closed obstetric unit is a symptom of the ongoing struggles facing maternal health providers, especially in rural areas.
“I think that’s going to cause other problems with infant mortality and taking care of mothers and everything else, but they’re just trying to keep the doors open,” Stone said.
Arkansas consistently has among the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality nationwide, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.
The Ouachita County Medical Center employed an obstetric physician who will be leaving the state now that the labor and delivery unit has closed, Harper said. She also said two obstetric nurses who worked in the closed unit have been transferred to the hospital’s emergency room.
“If obstetric patients present with urgent needs in the ER, there are people there who can take care of them,” Harper said. “What we’ll do is assess them, stabilize them, and then transfer if their condition warrants it, and if not, treat them and send them home, if it’s not obstetric needs. We will have the capability to monitor to see if they’re in labor and what the fetal heart rates are.”
Most of the Camden hospital’s patients are admitted through its emergency room, Harper said. The hospital applied this week to become a rural emergency hospital, which would allow it to collect more federal funds in exchange for reducing or eliminating inpatient services and focus on emergency and outpatient treatment. It would be the sixth Arkansas hospital to assume this designation if the federal government approves the application.
Rural hospitals with 50 beds or fewer are eligible to apply for rural emergency hospital status. If accepted, they are subsequently licensed for zero inpatient beds.
Patients’ average stay at a rural emergency hospital over the course of a year must be no more than 24 hours, according to federal eligibility requirements. Delivering a baby via Cesarean section requires two or three days in a hospital for post-birth observation, so the Ouachita County Medical Center would have had to limit its obstetric services to low-risk patients only if the maternity ward had remained open, Harper said.