System under stress | Babies suffer when rural maternity wards close, warns SRPC president
The provinces’ increasing tendency to try saving money by closing rural maternity wards hurts rural women and their babies and saves no money, says a medical organization.
A recent report from the government-sponsored Canadian Institute for Health Information said more than 17 percent of rural women in Canada must travel more than two hours to find a hospital where their babies can be born and then often spend weeks there, separated from family and community.
Many of the babies are born premature, possibly because of the stress, it added.
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For urban women, less than one percent face the same travel and separation from home, according to the report.
“Babies suffer when rural hospitals close their obstetrical wards,” Society of Rural Physicians of Canada (SRPC) president and Inuvik doctor Braam de Klerk said in a July 8 statement in response to the data.
“The pennies saved are foolish when you consider the risk to health and increased dollars of caring for those premature babies. Provincial governments should support rural women with their need for local care.”
The society teamed up with a coalition of associations representing nurses, family doctors and midwives to produce a working paper published last week that called for better rural maternal services.
“Rural maternity care services are under stress and many rural and remote communities across Canada have seen local maternity services diminish and close,” it said.
“Rural women and families who have to travel to access maternity care experience increased levels of stress, increased personal costs and increased rates of adverse outcomes.”
The problem the report identified was also flagged in a decade-old report on Canada’s health-care system chaired by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow.
The Romanow report lamented the lack of investment in rural health care and proposed a multibillion-dollar investment in rural health services and facilities.
It has not happened.
“Current health-care policy does not adequately support rural nurses, doctors and midwives to meet the needs of rural women, and new approaches are needed to support collaborative, integrated and safe care for mothers and newborns in rural Canada,” said the latest report sponsored endorsed in part by the SRPC.
The report’s first recommendation is that “women who reside in rural and remote communities in Canada should receive high-quality maternity care as close to home as possible.”
Instead, conditions have worsened.
“Recent years have seen the closure of rural maternity programs as part of regional-ization of care and cost-cutting,” it said.
“In addition to administrative pressures, lack of skilled personnel in maternity care has resulted in service decreases and program closures.”
