MedStar Washington Hospital Center closed one of its two postpartum units on Sunday.
Last week, nurses walked out of the hospital on their lunch break to protest the hospital’s decision.
The postpartum Unit 5F closing means 11 beds lost and eight nurses reassigned, according to a union representing registered nurses at the facility.
News4 spoke to one of the nurses at the hospital about what the closure means for patients and nurses alike.
Why is the unit closing?
MedStar Washington says it remains committed to high quality care, and claims that the 18 beds that remain after consolidation will be sufficient.
A statement sent to News4 reads, in part:
“Similar to hospitals nationwide, we are facing increasing financial pressures, including significant changes in Medicaid that affect all our services.”
“At the same time, birth rates in the District have steadily declined, mirroring national trends,” the statement continues. “In response, we are consolidating postpartum services to better match resources with volumes.”
Averie Foster, a nurse at Medstar, said while no nurse is out a job, a lot of nurses are “very heartbroken.”
“This is going to have like a major impact on the amount of patients that we’re able to accept and take care of,” Foster said.
Foster explained that there are two units involved in the process of delivering a baby at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.
“We have our labor and delivery unit, and then after they give birth to their babies or if they’re one of our patients who have to stay here for the rest of their pregnancy, they’ll come to our postpartum floor.”
However, she says the labor and delivery can only accept as many patients as they can handle. They can’t make room for new patients until they have the room to take the moms who have already had given birth.
One in three babies in D.C. are born at the hospital, Foster said. Because of that, there’s a high volume of patients constantly coming through the doors.
“Because we no longer have the room to house all of them, our concerns are mostly going to be where are these patients gonna go because we’re gonna fill up really quick and we don’t know where these patients who come in to have these babies are gonna go, where they’re going to be waiting or how long they’re waiting.”
Will Medstar have enough beds in the single postpartum unit?
Foster said even if it’s a decline, the staff won’t be able to tell because “there are plenty of weeks we are coming in where both of our postpartum units are full.”
“We have patients on labor and delivery who are waiting for a bed to open up to come to get care from us, and I can say just this year alone, we have been on diversion, which means we have to send patients to other hospitals because we don’t have the room for them over 17 times already,” Foster said.
Mindy, an RN for more than three decades, noted last week that her own grandchildren were delivered in a setting that she believes needs to be preserved.
“Their mother couldn’t deliver regular, and had to end up having a C-section,” Mindy said. “If it wasn’t for the Washington Hospital Center, maybe their mom wouldn’t be here, and neither one of my grandchildren would be here.”
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