North Hawaii Community Hospital began limiting on Friday who can register to give birth at the Waimea facility.
Hospital CEO Ken Wood announced the policy change, which will require any woman registering to give birth at the hospital to live within the hospital’s service area, which includes North and South Kohala, Honokaa, Laupahoehoe, Ookala, Paauilo, Papaaloa and Kukio and Hualalai. Right now, Wood said in the announcement, 51 percent of women giving birth at the hospital live outside of the service area, and while the hospital’s maternal health services is “designed to support” 550 births annually, last year the program’s midwives and obstetric staff delivered 663 babies.
Wood did not respond to a message left on his cellphone Friday afternoon.
The requirement to live within the hospital’s service area only affects new patients registering with the hospital and not women who have already registered but not yet delivered. Kona Community Hospital and Hilo Medical Center have adequate maternal care capacity for women living outside of North Hawaii Community Hospital’s service area, he said in the announcement.
He blamed overcrowding and reimbursement rates that do not cover the cost of care for the limits.
“NHCH cannot continue to serve the entire island with over half of the babies delivered coming from women who live outside our North Hawaii service area,” he said in a written statement. “Our commitment is to reduce overcrowding, preserve safety, improve patient satisfaction and maintain our NHCH program where midwives are an integral part of our maternal care program.”
The announcement did not make clear whether any midwives would be let go, as hospital employees and community members feared would happen.
Protests and comments in advance of the announcement were critical of any proposals that would limit deliveries at the hospital or reduce the number of midwives the hospital employs.
Dani Kennedy, secretary for the Midwives Alliance of Hawaii, told West Hawaii Today in March she worried women unable to choose North Hawaii’s midwife program, and who cannot afford to pay the out-of-pocket expenses to have a midwife-assisted birth at home, will choose an unassisted birth at home before they deliver in a hospital. North Hawaii’s consideration of changing the program is a move backward, against the trend on the mainland, where midwifery is becoming more recognized, not less, Kennedy claimed.
