Ascension Hospital’s Plan To Close Labor and Delivery Unit Criticized
City officials condemn this. It leaves 'no labor and delivery services" on city's South Side.
Hospital waiting area. (Public Domain)
A hospital on Milwaukee’s South Side is scheduled to end its labor and delivery services Wednesday, laying off about 20 employees and requiring expectant parents who live in that part of the city to travel farther to give birth.
With that action by Ascension St. Francis Hospital, “there will be no labor and delivery services on the South Side of Milwaukee by any entity,” said Jamie Lucas, executive director of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals. The union represents about 500 employees at the hospital, including nurses, technicians, medical assistants, and housekeepers.
St. Francis is part of Ascension, a Catholic-affiliated, nonprofit nationwide chain based in St. Louis. The corporate parent issued a statement Monday confirming plans to close the St. Francis labor and delivery services, moving them to two affiliated hospitals: Columbia-St. Mary’s on Milwaukee’s East Side and St. Joseph on the city’s North Side.
“This consolidation ensures access to the most comprehensive labor, delivery and postpartum services to all Ascension Wisconsin moms and babies,” the statement declared, including specialty care for newborns and a neonatal intensive care unit, among other services.
The statement was distributed to the media with the instruction to attribute it to an “Ascension Wisconsin spokesperson.” Ascension did not respond to follow-up inquiries.
In an interview, Lucas, the union executive director, said the loss of St. Francis’ labor and delivery unit would worsen health equity in the city, which already has “one of the worst maternal death rates in the country.”
It’s part of a broader wave throughout the health care system that has focused on reducing staff size and cutting labor costs at the expense of patient care, he added.
In response to questions that union members posed to hospital managers about the greater distance that South Side residents will have to travel to either of the other hospitals, “they said, ‘it’s not that much further away,’” Lucas said. “It is that much further away when you have two jobs and you don’t have a car.”
He called the hospital management out of touch with the community in which St. Francis is located.
“The people who make these decisions, they live a fundamentally different life than the people who are affected by these decisions,” Lucas said. “This is going to harm people’s ability to access this care.”
Lucas said the loss of jobs by 20 union members and “a handful of others” not in the union would also contribute to the strain already being felt in other areas of the hospital, as well burdening low-income residents in the hospital’s urban community.
According to Lucas, it wasn’t clear to employees or union members how long the hospital’s decision was in the works. When union members raised the prospect of the unit closing at a labor-management meeting in November, managers denied any such plans, he said. The union received official word of the decision on Friday, Dec. 16.
The union has been reaching out to elected officials including Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson as well as members of the Milwaukee city council, county board and in the state Legislature in hopes that they could bring some pressure on the hospital to reverse its decision.
Late Tuesday afternoon, four Milwaukee alders issued a joint statement about the planned closing.
Earlier Tuesday, State Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) decried the hospital’s decision, attributing it to a broader pattern of disinvestment from facilities where workers have unions and favoring non-union operations.
“We don’t have a healthcare system so much as a profit machine that punishes the sick and rewards the greedy,” Larson said in a written statement.
Unlike the alders’ statement, Larson directly criticized the hospital’s owner, Ascension, which operates 139 hospitals in 19 states as well as more than 2,000 other clinics and specialty health care centers. In Wisconsin it has hospitals or other facilities in Milwaukee and its suburbs Brookfield and Wauwatosa, as well as in Racine and Appleton.
Larson’s statement included a link to a Dec. 15 New York Times article that spotlighted Ascension in a series investigating the nation’s nonprofit hospital corporations. Ascension “spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion in cash reserves,” according to the Times.
The article states that the hospital system’s strategy to reduce its labor force “left Ascension flat-footed for Covid.”
After the article’s publication, Ascension circulated a statement to its employees that said accounts the story included “are not an accurate representation of the extraordinary care we provide to patients, their families and our communities each and every day.”
Milwaukee hospital’s plan to close labor and delivery unit comes under fire was originally published by Wisconsin Examiner
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Ascension is horrible.
I have two very recent examples of substandard care at one Ascension hospital.
Based on what I know, it appears everything was a result of a level of staffing designed to be minimum. No one died as a result thank god, but much anguish and concern among relatives was the result.
Maybe state charters for hospitals and city occupancy permits should stipulate a required core of services, and minimum levels of staffing and equipment, based on population/territory served.
If those 2 jurisdictions can’t prevent this, perhaps Medicare can set equivalent requirements for participation in their program.
The New York Times on 12/19/2022 published a front-page article regarding the corporate Ascension strategy of reducing staff at all hospital locations to maximize corporate profits. Based on the article, they succeeded big time.
This policy was in place when Ascension took over the Milwaukee hospitals.
So, based on that article, the closing and awful treatment of professional staff could have been predicted.
Surely there is something that can be done by politicians, as it seems we can expect more insults and declining care.
Both of my parents spent time at the main unit of the Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s Medical Center shortly before their passing in 2017 and 2019, and, at the time, I found the level of staffing greatly lacking. My complaints do not center around the staff,members themselves–who were professional and competent, once I finally was able to find one–but, rather, the dearth of them, There were occasions when both my mother and my father (age 95 and a week short of 98, respectively) were writhing in pain and crying out (both my parents were otherwise loath to complain about their own physical pain and suffering), and, despite extensive use of the nurse call button, no response in both cases for 25-30 minutes. I finally had to leave them both alone while I searched the corridors of the floor (peeking into the open doors of patient rooms) and the break room for a staff member. The problem was not unprofessional conduct by the staffers, but their number: I took me a long time to find anyone connected with the hospital. There was nobody at the floor desk to help me to find a nurse or nurse’s aide. The floor was, in my opinion, dangerously understaffed. My problem with the Ascension hospital is not with the staffers themselves, but of an administration that deploys so few of them on patient floors.
We all used to say that Catholics were only concerned about life before birth. Boy, oh, boy, they’re really cutting it close here. Now, they want to make labor and delivery as difficult as possible. South Siders be damned!