Las Vegas still short OB-GYN care options
SF doctor now provides services
About three months into her pregnancy last year, Vanetia Gonzales — who expected to have her third child in her hometown of Las Vegas, N.M. — was notified that the city’s hospital would no longer offer delivery services. The news felt abrupt and she initially struggled to find a doctor in Santa Fe, the closest care option, who was taking new patients.
But she found one and, at the start of her pregnancy, the 27-yearold would drive to Dr. Geoff Elmore in Santa Fe once a month — one hour each way — for pre-natal appointments. In the final two months, she made the drive every two weeks and
then weekly.
“You’re scared on the way to Santa Fe toward the end of your pregnancy … . Am I going to go into labor? Will I have to deliver on the side of the road?,” said Gonzales. She had post-birth hemorrhaging during her second pregnancy and worried about the possibility of another emergency during the commute.
A pregnant Las Vegas woman died in a March 2016 car accident after traveling to Santa Fe for a pre-natal appointment.
Gonzales said frequent trips were expensive and she also had to hire babysitters because it was too far to take her two young sons along. She also had to take time off work at Luna Community College, which cut into her maternity leave time when she gave birth to her third child, Alina, in June of 2016. “I wasn’t able to spend as much time with my daughter when I had her,” she said.
Alta Vista Regional Hospital in Las Vegas says it’s still on track to reinstate its full obstetric-gynecological (OB-GYN) services in October. Meanwhile, Gonzales’ doctor is now trying to fill the gaps for patients there.
About every other week since August, Elmore’s employer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, has rented rooms at Las Vegas’ Meadow City Family Clinic for him and a few assistants to conduct appointments. Though Elmore’s deliveries and surgical procedures are still done in Santa Fe, in Las Vegas he’s able to provide pre- or post-natal checkups; pre- or post-operation appointments for either C-sections or other procedures for incontinence and prolapse; and other routine gynecological screenings. For pregnant women who have increasingly frequent appointments, this allows them to stay close to home more often until delivery day.
“We can cut down the number of (appointments) where they’re driving back and forth,” he said.
Gonzales said those services would have made her experience easier and should especially benefit women who don’t have reliable transportation or money for gas to get to pregnancy-related checkups. She now plans to schedule her annual appointments with Elmore when he’s in town.
Alta Vista Regional Hospital closed its obstetrics program in March 2016 due to staff shortages, which led to a formal query from Attorney General Hector Balderas to see what steps the nonprofit hospital was taking to bring back the OB-GYN program, calling its loss an “unacceptable gap” and noting his office’s oversight of charitable organizations like the hospital.
Hospital care returning
In June, Alta Vista announced plans to bring back services with the hiring of two OB-GYNs in its Las Vegas Medical group clinic. They will work at both the clinic and the hospital.
In an email to the Journal on Wednesday, hospital spokesperson Linda Leyba said the new doctors began scheduling patients Sept. 5 for appointments at the clinic starting Oct. 2. Leyba said the hospital is “fully prepared” to open the hospital’s obstetrics at the same time. She would not specify how many OB-GYN patients have been scheduled, but said it was “substantial.”
With a projected opening in less than two weeks, Leyba said the hospital is still looking for full-time nurses for the unit. She did not answer questions regarding how many nurses have been hired or how many are still needed, but said staffing levels are “appropriate to provide high-quality, safe care” and, like any hospital, Alta Vista is continually recruiting qualified staff.
“Our OB-GYN service will be staffed appropriately with a combination of full-time, part-time and contract nursing staff,” she wrote. “We continue our emphasis on recruitment and are still pursuing nurses to fill fulltime positions.”
A June press release said the hospital needed about 10 nurses for the OB unit. The clinic, Leyba said this week, is fully staffed, but didn’t respond to a request for staffing numbers there.
Elmore said he was inspired to start his clinic by the Interstate 25 crash last year that killed a pregnant Las Vegas woman who had to come to Santa Fe for pre-natal care.
Because of medical privacy laws, he was unable to say if the woman who died was a patient of his. But a few weeks after the crash in May, Gonzales says Elmore asked her during one of her Santa Fe visits if Las Vegas women would appreciate him coming to Las Vegas.
“That just hit me,” said Gonzales. “That was just really sweet that’s something (he would do),” she said. Per trip, Elmore says he sees about 15-18 women. There are about 140 total OB-GYN patients from Las Vegas being treated by Presbyterian Healthcare doctors, according to spokesperson Kerri Dufault.
Janis Santistevan, a nurse practitioner who provides women’s health care and basic pre-natal care at the Meadow City clinic, said she’s seen an increased need for doctors to meet these pregnant women where they live.
Otherwise, most in Las Vegas would go with “sporadic or no care at all” because most haven’t been able to take off work or simply can’t afford to go out of town often enough without the local hospital providing services.
Over the past year, Santistevan, who said her clinic’s services likely wouldn’t change with the reopening of Alta Vista’s maternity services because she isn’t licensed to deliver, said most of her patients now go to Santa Fe or Taos to give birth.
Though he hopes to see Las Vegas’s hospital have full OB-GYN services again, Elmore says his trips are planned indefinitely because of the number of regular patients he has already started treating.
“Even if they (Alta Vista) do provide services, which would be great for the community, we have patients who may want to keep coming (to) Santa Fe,” said Elmore.