Copley Hospital will close its birthing center, the hospital announced in a press release late Friday afternoon, though no specific closure date was given.
Copley’s Women’s Center will remain open, and pre- and postpartum care will continue to be offered at the Morristown hospital. More details will be provided to staff and patients of the birthing center in the coming weeks, the press release said.
“We will share detailed information about our partner labor and delivery hospitals to help facilitate birthing family decision making,” the statement read. “Current staff will be given assistance to transition to new appointments and positions both at Copley and in the region.”
Copley Hospital has been formally considering closing the midwife-led birthing center since March when its board of trustees announced that a consultant was being hired to review several options, though concerns about a potential closure had been raised months earlier.
Since then, community members, including current and former patients, have been organizing public showings of support to try to keep the birthing center open. They hosted a Mother’s Day rally in downtown Morrisville, wrote personal letters of appeal to the hospital’s board of trustees and distributed lawn signs throughout the surrounding area.
The Copley Hospital Board of Trustees voted for the closure of the birthing center on Tuesday, the press release said.
Board Chair Anne Bongiorno acknowledged the outpouring of testimonials board members and administrators had received in the release.
“The Board is grateful to the community, Copley staff, and everyone who shared their personal stories, family connections or professional experiences with the birthing center. It has been a privilege to know how much our community cares for our hospital,” Bongiorno said as quoted in the statement. “With the diligent work by everyone over many months, including the consultant’s thorough research and report, we believe we have made the best decision possible in a challenging situation.”
The press release announcing the closure noted Vermont has the lowest birth rate in the nation and Copley has experienced a downward trend in births at the hospital. Currently less than half of all births in Lamoille County take place at the center, according to the release.
Copley Hospital, like other small community hospitals in the state, struggles with maintaining financial stability. The birthing center operates at a loss of between $3 million and $5 million annually, hospital administrators have said. In recent years, the number of births at the center had dropped to less than 200 per year, below the threshold necessary to maintain efficiencies of scale, according to a report by the consultancy Oliver Wyman that proposed ways to reduce overall health care costs.
Mary Lou Kopas, one of three full-time nurse midwives at the birthing center, said Friday she was “just heartbroken” by the news, which staff had received earlier in the afternoon.
“I love this group of people,” she said. “It’s a really special practice.”
The Copley birthing center’s staff had just been celebrated recently for the quality of its care and its outcomes at the annual conference for the Vermont Child Health Improvement Program at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, she said.
Kopas acknowledged the financial challenges faced by Copley and the state’s broader health care system, but said there were strategies hospital leaders could have tried in recent years to boost the number of births if volume was a concern.
“If there was truly a commitment to keeping the service for the community, why was there none of that?” she said.
