By TESS VRBIN | Arkansas Advocate
Baptist Health is closing the labor and delivery unit and ending obstetric care at its Fort Smith hospital, leaving Arkansas with only 31 hospitals where women can give birth in less than a third of the state’s counties.
The announcement is the latest in a series of closures to hit Arkansas over the past several years. Baptist Health-Fort Smith is the eighth Arkansas hospital to shutter its labor and delivery unit since 2020.
“While this is not the path we would have chosen, this decision intends to preserve the hospital’s overall health and sustain the core services our community relies on most,” Cara Wade, Baptist’s executive director of corporate communications, said in a statement.
The decision “follows a careful analysis of the program’s long-term operational sustainability amid significant and sustained challenges, including the rising costs of specialized care,” Wade said.
Deliveries at the Fort Smith hospital dropped from 92 per month to about 20 per month over the past five years, Wade said. The April 28 closure of the obstetric unit costs 40 jobs, and the health system is working on “a safe and coordinated transition so that no patient experiences a gap in care,” she said.
Last week, Baptist Health denied reports that it would end inpatient services and focus on emergency medicine at its Fort Smith hospital due to financial losses. Hospitals that make this shift in services can collect more federal Medicaid and Medicare funds.
Baptist Health CEO Troy Wells said the Fort Smith campus will undergo a “transition” in the next few years but did not specify what kind, according to Talk Business & Politics.
Only 22 of Arkansas’ 75 counties have labor and delivery units, leaving women to drive for an hour or more to receive care in some parts of the state. Paramedics in rural areas have seen an uptick in the number of deliveries being performed in ambulances.
Mercy Hospital Fort Smith continues to deliver babies, but some Arkansas counties do not have hospitals, and others have only one hospital but no labor and delivery unit.
Most recently, the Ouachita County Medical Center in Camden stopped providing obstetric care because it did not deliver enough babies to justify the cost of keeping the department open, CEO Glenda Harper said in January.
On March 3, Baptist Health announced it would add obstetric emergency departments to the labor and delivery units at its hospitals in Little Rock, North Little Rock and Conway. Obstetric emergency departments provide around-the-clock specialized care to patients who are at least 20 weeks pregnant or postpartum.
Baptist Health’s announcement acknowledged that Arkansas has one of the nation’s highest maternal mortality rates, meaning the rate of women who die during or within a year after childbirth. Arkansas also has one of the nation’s highest infant mortality rates.
Health systems throughout Arkansas have launched initiatives in the past few years to make maternal and infant health care more accessible, especially to low-income Arkansans. In northeast Arkansas, St. Bernards Medical Center runs the Maternal Life360 HOME program, which allows pregnant and postpartum Medicaid recipients in Craighead, Greene and Lawrence counties to receive at-home visits during and after high-risk pregnancies.
The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences announced last year that it would use a $4 million federal grant to launch a multi-pronged expansion of obstetric services in Ashley and Union counties this year.
The Ashley County Medical Center in Crossett is among the eight Arkansas hospitals that have closed their labor and delivery units since 2020. The hospitals in Bradley, Columbia and Ouachita counties have also ended obstetric services since then. All three counties border Union County, where the South Arkansas Regional Hospital in El Dorado has a labor and delivery unit.
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