About two dozen people stood with signs at the corner of Jackson and Main streets in Willimantic on a recent Friday afternoon, about a mile from Windham Hospital.
“We're becoming a health care desert,” said Brenda Buchbinder, a longtime resident.
Buchbinder and other residents, community leaders, activists and health care providers came together this past year to form a grassroots coalition to protest Hartford HealthCare’s decision to close Windham Hospital’s labor and delivery services, which have been offered at its site on Mansfield Avenue for 88 years.
While the parent health organization cites shrinking birth volume and problems in obstetrics staff recruitment, some community members remain concerned that closing the inpatient service will ultimately hurt Willimantic women, especially those in marginalized and lower-income families.
“We have people that are immigrants here, we have people that are refugees here, we have people who are single parents, we have people that are living very, very much hand to mouth,” Buchbinder said. “And they’re trying to make community here, and to rip them away during this important event and make sure that they get to some of these big centers that are supposedly better and safer — it’s not better and safer to put those women on highways or in the airspace.”
Windham Hospital began diverting and transporting many maternity patients to Hartford HealthCare’s Backus Hospital in Norwich, about a 30-minute drive on county and local roads, last summer. Patients have also gone to hospitals in Manchester and Hartford to deliver babies.
The hospital’s unit closure still needs final approval by the state Office of Health Strategy.
Parent company Hartford HealthCare declined to comment on the pending decision, but in documents filed with the state, the health organization said Windham Hospital has struggled with declining births as “a significant number of Windham-area mothers are choosing to have babies at other area hospitals.”
As many as 393 babies were born at Windham Hospital in fiscal year 2012, according to data from the Connecticut Hospital Association. By fiscal year 2019, the number of births dropped to 99, the lowest in the state.
Hartford HealthCare officials wrote to the state that the 130-bed acute care community hospital’s solitary OB-GYN practice stopped providing services in 2015 because of declining patient volumes and staffing coverage issues.
“Low patient volume creates an environment in which it is difficult for providers to maintain clinical skill sets,” officials wrote. “This circumstance negatively impacts the recruitment and retention of physicians and nurses and makes the safe operation of the program a constant challenge.”
National research has found that low patient volume at rural and urban non-teaching hospitals is associated with an increased risk of delivery complications like postpartum hemorrhage, blood infusion, infections and more.
However, organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have also concluded that “closing hospitals with low-volume obstetric services could have counterproductive adverse health consequences and potentially increase health care disparities by limiting access to maternity care.”
That’s the concern Arvind Shaw posed to the health organization last year shortly after Windham Hospital announced the maternity unit closure.
Shaw is the CEO of Generations Family Health Center, a federally qualified health center that provides low-cost safety net health care services in Willimantic.
“Figuring out that, OK, these patients over here will bear the cost of transportation, who will bear the cost of these services being removed from here, where the other hospitals have profited from it -- this is not health equity,” he said.
Shaw questioned whether earlier and better investments into the maternity unit and other hospital departments would have kept patient volume up in the first place.
“Our women are worth it. They should have the best care we can possibly give,” he said. “And for this large hospital to say that they can’t provide safe services anymore, it really makes a lot of public health questions come to the forefront now, insofar as, how is it we need to fund these things?”
The state Office of Health Strategy is expected to review the hospital’s decision next month.
