Hospital maternity ward closes after century of delivering babies

LACONIA — Lakes Region General Hospital closed its maternity ward Wednesday after more than a century of delivering babies.

The hospital said earlier this year that it would end labor and delivery services on May 30, in part because fewer babies are being born in this area. The move is expected to save LRGH $1 million a year at a time when it is facing major financial difficulties.

Obstetrics nurses filed out of the hospital Wednesday afternoon, some walking hand-in-hand into the parking lot, but they declined comment.

Hospital spokeswoman Sandy Marshal didn’t have details on whether any of the nurses would move to other departments at the hospital, or would be going to new jobs.

She said the hospital wasn’t planning any event to mark the closing of the birthing center and that it wouldn’t add to earlier statements made when the planned closure was announced.  

The hospital will continue to offer prenatal, postnatal and pediatric care, but all deliveries will be done at Concord Hospital, which is 45 minutes away.

Last year, LRGH delivered 283 babies, down from 346 in 2015. Not all of them were from mothers who live in the Laconia area. About 50 of the yearly deliveries were from mothers who live in Franklin and the Twin Rivers area, which is as close to Concord as it is to Laconia.

Concord Hospital delivers about 1,200 babies a year and its officials say it should have no problem accommodating the extra deliveries from Laconia.

For expectant mothers who live in Laconia, transportation to Concord will be one of the discussion points during prenatal care, hospital president and chief executive officer Kevin Donovan said when the planned closure was announced in February.

He has also said at the time that the LRGH emergency room could delivery a baby if the situation required it.

“We are trying to make sure we have the appropriate safeguards in the emergency room setting so that if a woman does come into the ER and can't make it to Concord, or can't be sent to Concord because she is in active labor, we'll have the resources and we'll train up the staff to make sure they are willing and able to do the delivery,” he said.

He also said an obstetrics doctor would be on call to join the emergency room staff in such situations.

The hospital had operating losses of $2 million from October through January, the first four months of the 2018 fiscal year. Those losses, blamed on light patient volume combined with low payments, led to cutbacks intended to improve the bottom line by $7 million annually.

Many of the women who have babies in Laconia are on Medicaid, which pays only a fraction of the cost of labor and delivery services.