Mesa View Obstetrics Unit To Close On Oct. 1

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

Mesa View Regional Hospital (MVRH) in Mesquite has announced that it will no longer provide inpatient labor and delivery and nursery services as of thee nd of this month. All patients scheduled to deliver at the hospital after October 1 is being contacted so that other delivery arrangements can be made.

The decision to discontinue these services was much more than a mere financial consideration, according to MVRH Business Development Officer Rob Fuller. Rather the decision was based on an array of more complex factors.
“We certainly don’t ever want to stop providing a service,” Fuller said last week in an interview with the Progress. “But there is so much more to (providing that service) that most people just don’t see on the surface of it.”

The hospital has experienced a marked decrease in births over the past decade. In 2008, Mesa View had a total of 236 deliveries for the year. Last year the hospital saw only 63 deliveries in total. That is a 74 percent decrease.

Fuller explained that these numbers are no just isolated to the northeast Clark County region. They are reflective of a trend across the country toward more specialized care in fields like obstetrics.
“It is moving that way all across the country where the hospitals that are still doing delivery of babies have specialists called Laborists where that is all they do,” Fuller said. “Patients still get their pre-natal and post-natal care from their OB/GYN physician. But that isn’t who delivers the baby. They go to the hospital and a Laborist, who they may have never seen before, does that.”

MVRH was on the brink of closing down its inpatient delivery room once before back in 2012. At that time, the annual number of deliveries had dropped as far as 111. That was down from the hospital’s high of 236 births in 2008.

Now, having steadily dropped even more since that time, the question opens up regarding the future safety of the program and an element called “skills maintenance.” That is when there are not enough specific procedures being performed in a hospital department to allow the attending staff to gain enough experience to retain their skills in that procedure.

To illustrate, Fuller points out that the staff at Dixie Regional Hospital in St. George perform around 300 deliveries per month. This allows the Dixie Regional staff enough practice with the procedure to keep their skills sharp, Fuller said.

With only 63 births last year, and the prospect of a continuing downward trend for the future, the MVRH staff couldn’t be expected to keep up with that, Fuller added.
“We certainly wouldn’t want to get to the point where we keep a program open and it is no longer safe,” Fuller said. “We don’t want to go down that road. It is not fair to the patient.”
Furthermore, with fewer and fewer births being done, it becomes increasingly difficult to recruit new nursing staff qualified to handle that kind of care.

“The professionals who have gone to school to deliver babies have done it because they want to delivery babies,” Fuller said. “When they look at our numbers, it just isn’t attractive to those skilled people. So we have difficulty filling those spots.”

The hospital will continue to provide outpatient obstetrical services, inpatient and outpatient gynecological services, and women’s health services, such as pre-natal, post-partum, routine well woman exams and mammograms.

The MVRH emergency department will also continue to deliver babies when the situation is urgent. The hospital’s experienced clinical team is trained to provide emergency medical care and, if needed, make arrangements for a transfer to a higher level of care.

Furthermore, the hospital continues to see strong demand for primary care and has already recruited four new primary care providers that will join the team in the next six months.
“The physicians and staff have worked extremely hard over the last several years to build a strong, viable OB program, but with historically declining volumes the demand is simply not there,” said Ned Hill, CEO of Mesa View. “This has been a very difficult decision, but we are confident it is the right one.

Discontinuing elective deliveries will allow our hospital to continue building up the services most needed in our community.”