rewrite this title One Maine community’s fight to save a birthing center

In mid-coast Maine a grassroots coalition is fighting to prevent the proposed closure of Miles Hospital’s labor and delivery center.

Transcript

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

In rural America, hospitals are losing maternity services fast. In Maine, 11 of the state’s birthing units have closed, another is under threat. But as Elaine Appleton-Grant reports, an organization is fighting aggressively to save it. We’ll note this story includes vivid descriptions of giving birth.

ELAINE APPLETON-GRANT, BYLINE: On Thursday, August 6, the trustees of MaineHealth will decide whether the obstetrics department at Miles hospital in Mid-Coast Maine will close. MaineHealth is the state’s largest nonprofit health system. A grassroots group is battling to protect the service – a service they say can mean the difference between life and death. Their campaign took off on June 2 in a school gym packed with nearly 300 people. At the mic, Leah Hurwitz describes her 8-month-old baby’s birth at Miles. She was breech.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LEAH HURWITZ: (Crying) Before I could fully process what was happening, my water broke and I felt a foot coming out of me. By the time we arrived, my daughter was well on her way.

APPLETON-GRANT: Her daughter’s head got stuck. She lost oxygen for seven minutes. She wonders, what if she’d been five minutes later?

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HURWITZ: (Crying) My daughter would not be alive. I would not be alive. She is alive because I live 10 minutes from a qualified labor and delivery department with a qualified OB on staff.

APPLETON-GRANT: The majority of rural hospitals in America no longer deliver babies, and more than 10% of existing maternity units are in danger of closing. Dr. Tim Goltz, a longtime Miles family physician, doesn’t want this to be one of them.

TIM GOLTZ: There’s no doubt in my mind that if OB goes away at Miles that there will be mothers and babies who die because of that decision.

APPLETON-GRANT: Three local moms are determined not to let that happen. Margaret Reynolds, Moira Rosie Richards (ph) and Leslie Wolfe spun up the Miles Delivers Action Coalition in late May. It’s now an influential advocacy group that claims some 10,000 supporters. Reynolds learned about the potential closure from her Miles midwife. That night, she texted Rosie Richards. They quickly posted flyers for a morning of action.

MARGARET REYNOLDS: And it was just, like, all these moms I had never met showed up at my front yard. And one of the moms brought a bouncy house, and so all the kids went into the bouncy house, and we all kind of just talked.

APPLETON-GRANT: They conducted their opposition as if they were a startup with people leading research, legal, political advocacy, communications. They would seek solutions.

REYNOLDS: One of the most amazing things is that almost immediately people started coming to us from inside. So we had their own board members come to us, at least three of them. We had their providers come to us in droves. We had donors come to us. We had people saying they’re not listening to us. Do anything you can.

APPLETON-GRANT: The reality is rural birthing units lose money. Birth rates are declining and OBGYNs are in short supply. The coalition didn’t dispute that. But what they did have a problem with was what they call a lack of transparency on the part of MaineHealth. So they set out to understand the facts underneath the organization’s arguments, which included money.

REYNOLDS: One of our coalition members, he pulled together just a massive amount of information on their financial situation.

APPLETON-GRANT: Then they published data showing Miles hospital is more profitable than most of MaineHealth’s 12 hospitals. Then MaineHealth stopped arguing that finances play into the decision. They now emphasize staffing struggles. When they can’t cover a shift, they divert patients elsewhere.

ANDY MUELLER: Our practicing obstetricians and gynecologists have great concerns about the inability to reliably staff a labor and delivery unit and having confusion in patients’ minds about where to go when they actually start laboring.

APPLETON-GRANT: That’s MaineHealth’s CEO, Andy Mueller. Pregnant women, he says, can move to two other MaineHealth hospitals. The health system claims that would only add 18 minutes to moms’ average drive times. But the coalition points out that for many people, drive times would be an hour or more, especially with tourist traffic or bad weather. Dr. Tim Goltz again.

GOLTZ: I think that the literature is very clear that the further you have to travel to deliver a baby, the higher the risk is of serious complications and death.

APPLETON-GRANT: Working with doctors, the coalition offered MaineHealth clinician resumes and proposed more sustainable ways to cover 24/7 care. The reception has been lukewarm. The coalition has been pushing hard. They posted on social media, quote, “a CEO paid $2.2 million should be expected to find solutions, not simply eliminate services.” When asked about that, CEO Andy Mueller said they’d tried.

MUELLER: I think we have put our heads together to try to find alternatives and unfortunately haven’t found any that work at the present time.

APPLETON-GRANT: On July 31, outgoing Governor Janet Mills wrote to the MaineHealth Board of Trustees, urging them to delay any decision for two years and to consider other alternatives. The state’s decline in birthing facilities is becoming an issue in the race to select a new governor. For NPR, I’m Elaine Appleton-Grant in Belfast, Maine.

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