Yet another Philadelphia hospital has announced the closing of its maternity unit. Citing financial stresses, Chestnut Hill Hospital said yesterday that it would stop delivering babies by Nov. 4 and close its maternity unit Nov. 7. Seventy hospital employees will lose their jobs. Since 1997, 15 hospitals in the region have closed their maternity units. Most say the combination of high medical malpractice insurance and low insurance reimbursements makes the service a money loser. With Chestnut Hill’s unit closed, only seven hospitals in Philadelphia will offer obstetrical care. Chestnut Hill has been delivering babies for 104 years. “We take no joy in doing this,” Brooks Turkel, the hospital’s chief executive officer, said yesterday. The hospital delivers about 1,000 babies a year, or 2 percent of the 53,000 babies born annually in Philadelphia and the four suburban Pennsylvania counties. Maternity care and the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit were losing $2.5 million a year, he said. It was too expensive for a relatively small program to support the NICU, he said, but that was the standard of care Philadelphians expect.
Please click on the link below to read the Philadelphia Inquirer article:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20080904_Another_maternity_unit_closing_in_Philadelphia.html
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