Frank Isele, executive director of The Indian River Hospital District, said the district is set to host a series of town halls throughout next week to discuss potentially increasing funding to Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital to ensure the county has access to maternity services.
"We wanted to make sure that we are getting ahead of any potential closures. Whether that be in three years, five years, 10 years, how can we make maternity services sustainable in our county for the foreseeable future? That's really our goal," he said.
In April of this year, another Treasure Coast hospital was forced to close its maternity ward, as the Cleveland Clinic Martin North Hospital was forced to move its delivery services to Cleveland Clinic Tradition Hospital.
"We are watching national trends, and what's happening nationally with closures of labor and delivery at hospitals. Most recently, Martin County, Martin North, had closed theirs on April 1. And so we have been having discussions about, that we don't anticipate a closure. We do have an agreement with Cleveland Clinic Indian River and they have committed to keeping their services open, but given the concerns of financial losses on these services nationally and locally with our hospital in Indian River County, it's just concerning," he said.
Isele said that in the event that the worst-case scenario does come to light, there are concerns.
"Every year, we deliver about 900 babies at our hospital. While there are labor and delivery services at hospitals to the north of us at Holmes, and the south of us at HCA Lawnwood, absorbing an additional 900 babies to the current labor and delivery programs is not an easy task. The increased distance to drive is one of the issues, but the biggest one before that is, do these hospitals have the capacity to absorb the deliveries?" he said.
As of now, the district already contributes funding to the hospital as part of its services, but the hospital is operating at a $7.7 million loss. The discussions, then, have been weighing the merit of increasing that funding to help offset the loss.
"The district already contributes $4.2 million to that. So there's where you get the gap. So $4.2 million covers our partners in women's health programs that we have been doing with the hospitals in our community since the '90s. Once we contribute the $4.2, then the gap is $3.5 million, and it's still a significant loss for the hospital. So, we wanted to have a discussion internally to say, okay, should the district allocate up to an additional $3.5 million to maternity at the hospital, just for the next 12 months, so we can have time for a larger discussion and to develop a long-term strategy of what we want maternity services to look like in our county," he said.
For the district, it is important that they get community input.
"So we wanted to get that in two ways. One is to make sure that we had a survey that was statistically significant and a county-wide survey and we are doing that by telephone. Of our 170,000 residents, many of them will be getting phone calls and asked about these maternity services. Another piece of this is the town halls, that we will be holding next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday," he said.
The meetings will be held in the south part of the county at the InterGenerational Center on Tuesday, Aug. 12 at 6 p.m., the north part at Sebastian Community Center on Wednesday, Aug. 13 at 6 p.m., and the central part at Gifford Youth Achievement Center on Thursday, Aug. 14 at 6 p.m.
"This is an opportunity for the public to come and I'm going to give an intro of the questions we are trying to have answered by the public, and see how they feel. The questions are simple. It's really one question, but it has two parts: Do you think it's important for expecting moms to have labor and delivery care close to home in Indian River County, and the second part of that is, would you support using local tax dollars to help keep those services available while we work on a solution?" he said.