“Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult. “Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving,” Bonner General’s announcement earlier this month said. Unlike the Bonner County hospital’s announcement, however, Valor Health did not cite Idaho’s legal and political climate around reproductive health care as one of the challenges. Along with pregnant patients from Sandpoint, those in surrounding Bonner County and Boundary County communities will be directed to a medical center in Coeur d’Alene, about an hour away. That hospital serves a larger region in the Panhandle. The hospital could no longer safely provide the services, it said, due to a lack of pediatricians, fewer patients delivering babies there, and financial limitations. Luke’s and Saint Alphonsus health systems, which have invested heavily in maternity care in the past decade.īonner General Health in Sandpoint announced March 17 that its leadership “made every effort to avoid eliminating these services, but we have been forced” to do so. There are several hospitals within an hour of Emmett, including hospitals operated by St. Meanwhile, the small county-owned hospital had invested in maternity facilities but projected only 50 deliveries in the coming year, it said in the announcement.
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“It has been increasingly difficult and unsustainably expensive to recruit and retain a full team of high quality, broad-spectrum nurses to work in a rural setting where nurses need to be proficient in many different fields,” the hospital’s announcement said. The COVID-19 pandemic, a shortage of staff and nurses who can deliver babies, and the revenue challenges that have dogged rural health care for decades are among the factors the hospital referenced in an announcement posted to its website. Like many rural hospitals, Valor Health has taken multiple hits in recent years. It also comes as the Idaho Legislature is on track to defund research into preventing maternal deaths as state lawmakers have banned nearly all abortions and as Idaho chooses not extend its postpartum Medicaid coverage. Valor Health’s decision to stop offering labor and delivery care in Emmett comes on the heels of a North Idaho hospital shuttering its maternity services. A critical access hospital that serves a rural community northwest of Boise will no longer deliver babies after June 1.
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