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Lack of Births Ending Deliveries at Fulton Hospital: Doctor Again Must Relocate Where His Services Are Wanted.

Posted on: Friday, 3 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Shelley Byrne, The Paducah Sun, Ky.

Mar. 3--FULTON, Ky. -- Unlike most people, Dr. Gabor Laufer loves getting calls in the middle of the night.

As an obstetrician/gynecologist, those calls mean it's time for him to bring another baby into the world.

But in less than two months, the phone will stop ringing. And soon after, he and fellow OB/GYN Verna Porter will be out of their jobs at Parkway Regional Hospital here.

Citing declining numbers of births, Parkway will discontinue all labor and delivery services April 30. The closest hospitals that deliver babies are in Martin and Union City in Tennessee, 12 and 16 miles away, respectively. Because Tennessee hospitals do not accept Kentucky Medicaid patients, those patients must now travel to Mayfield, 25 miles away.

The hospital averaged fewer than eight births per month in 2005, and those numbers have been declining for the past four years, said Lee Ussery, director of marketing and public relations.

"Small hospitals cannot be everything to everybody anymore," Chief Executive Officer Tom Fewell said. "Those days are gone."

The hospital may use the space that currently houses labor and delivery services to provide more private rooms, Ussery said. It has also recently added space for a permanent Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner and plans to break ground this spring on a medical pavilion with doctors' offices and an expanded physical therapy department. The hospital has spent $3 million on facility improvements and expanded services over the past three years, Fewell said.

"The decision to phase out obstetrics was not an easy one, but we believe we'll be able to better serve the community by focusing our efforts in areas where there is greater demand," he said.

But change won't come easily for some patients.

"Right now I'm seven months pregnant, and it's not very convenient," said Jalena Midyett, 27, of Clinton.

Midyett had planned to give birth to her daughter at Parkway, as she did with her son three years ago.

She chose the hospital because it was only a 15-minute drive from her job at Clinton Bank, meaning she could schedule visits to Porter during her lunch break.

"She's (Dr. Porter) become like part of my family, and I'm having to switch," Midyett said.

Midyett said she had gotten to know the nurses at Parkway so well that she'd even felt comfortable calling them at home a few nights when she'd had questions or concerns.

She liked delivering at Parkway because she knew she and her newborn would get special attention.

"Other hospitals have 30 babies at one time and three nurses," she said. "(Parkway) has two babies and three nurses."

Ashley Robinson, 19, of Union City, will deliver her daughter this month at Parkway, but she dreads having to change doctors. Porter is the only gynecologist she has ever seen.

"I trust her," she said.

Laufer thinks it's becoming a trend for small rural hospitals to eliminate obstetrics services. Both of the last two hospitals he worked for -- in Pennington Gap, Va., and Norton, Va. -- both stopped delivering babies after they said it became too expensive for them to continue the service. He had hoped Parkway would be different when he signed a three-year contract in September.

"This is the third place I've found the same fate," he said. "Quite unusual."

When he goes job hunting this time, he said, "I will take a lot more careful look to see, 'Am I really needed?'"

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Paducah Sun, Ky.

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Source: The Paducah Sun

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