Disappearing care for mothers and infants

This month the

printed an article entitled, “It’s 4:00 AM. The Baby’s coming, but the Hospital is 100 Miles Away.” It told the harrowing story of a woman carrying twins, in premature labor, driving through the night in rural Missouri, trying to find a hospital that had mother and newborn care.

Reading further revealed the sad news that 85 rural hospitals in America have closed since 2010 and over half of those that remain open have stopped providing obstetrical care because of cost and liability. Loss of these services to mothers and their future newborns leads to less accessible prenatal care and increasing maternal and infant complications.

In New Mexico, the number of maternal deaths has gone up by 11 percent in the last two years. We rank number 37 out of 50. This statistic does not indicate how many other mothers and infants have suffered serious adversities from the absence of nearby obstetrical care.

In contrast, Taos has a hospital that has full-service obstetrical care. Women’s Health Institute, a part of Holy Cross Medical Center, has both certified obstetricians and nurse midwives providing 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week service to this community and all pregnant women visiting here.

I have read the recent articles in this newspaper that are critical of our hospital.

We struggle, like all rural American hospitals, with meeting the demands of ever-increasing costs in the face of less state and federal support.

As president of the medical staff, I see daily the frustrations of practitioners as we all try to provide expeditious, thorough and compassionate care and at times fall short of “everyone’s” expectations. Through all these challenges we maintain a dedicated staff doing its best under difficult constraints. Instead of abandoning a crucial service, the hospital remains committed to obstetrical services because this community deserves it. We, however, need a township who values having a community hospital that does its best to deliver a full spectrum of healthcare.

Our wandering pregnant patient from Missouri did reach a hospital in time but then had to travel 200 miles each day for months to attend to her infants. Her comment was,” If we can’t keep a hospital locally, then what is our community becoming?”

The answer is we need to enhance the good we have. Then we need to listen, learn and fix what we feel is poor. Together, healthcare practitioners and administrators will work along with elected officials and you, their constituents, to rebuild the support for our hospital. Taos is a community that is too good to become another statistic in the demise of rural healthcare.