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| Obstetric services to be dropped at PMH in 2010 |
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| The decision is based on the lack of primary care physicians available to provide the service |
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By Kevin Gaboury
By the end of the year, babies will no longer be born at Prineville's Pioneer Memorial Hospital.
The hospital made the difficult decision to phase out obstetric services by 2010 this week due to a sharp decrease in the number of primary care physicians available to provide the service, PMH Executive Director Don Wee said. He emphasized that the hospital's decision to pull the service is not financial in nature.
"We're losing the physicians that do OB and thus far, we've been unsuccessful in replacing those that are leaving," he said. "You can't do it with one or two."
According to the executive director, Dr. Hodges is moving to Eugene, Dr. Cleveland will rotate off active staff to work at Mosaic Medical in Prineville, and Dr. King has decided to stop providing OB care, but will remain in the community. This will leave one obstetrician, Dr. Weeks, at the hospital by year's end.
"The ideal number would probably be to have four that do OB, given our present structure," Wee said.
PMH's difficulty recruiting primary care physicians to fill the gap is a trend that is echoed in hospitals across the nation. The American Academy of Family Physicians predicts that the U.S. will be short more than 40,000 primary care physicians within the next 10 years.
"The supply and demand are out of balance - there's a high demand and low supply," Wee said. "A lot of the newer residents coming out of medical school are opting to go into other specialties, so the family practice specialty itself is producing fewer and fewer graduates, so it makes it that much more difficult."
Prenatal care will still be available at PMH, and expectant mothers will likely have the option to transfer to Bend, Redmond, or Madras when they deliver, Wee added. Pioneer Memorial Hospital saw a record 172 births in 2007 and 137 in 2008.
Wee mentioned, however, that obstetric services could be reinstated in the future, and said hospital staff are "always open to reevaluating that."
"Not all rural hospitals have obstetrics, so that fact that we've hung on this long is good, and we're hoping someday we can revisit this and bring it back," he said. "But given what we're facing right now and what the outlook it, it's a hard ticket to fill at this point." |
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