"I am proud to say I was born at Mercy Fitzgerald," said Sister Kathleen Keenan, a senior vice president of Mercy Health System, based in Conshohocken. "This was a very painful decision, for me personally and for all of us, but it was a necessary one."
The 17-bed maternity unit lost more than $2 million last year and expected a similar deficit this year, despite shutting down its neonatal intensive-care nursery in October, said Sister Donna Watto, a Mercy Health System spokeswoman.
Mercy Fitzgerald faces the same malpractice and financial pressures as other hospitals, but it is also coping with changing demographics. Because of a dwindling number of women of childbearing age in Delaware County and Southwest Philadelphia, the hospital projected only 595 deliveries this year - fewer than two a day, Watto said.
About 44 full- and part-time physicians, nurses, and support staff will be laid off from the hospital at Lansdowne Avenue and Baily Road, officials there said. At least two ob-gyns will continue to provide gynecological services.
Despite the recent maternity unit closures, 31 hospitals in the region are still delivering babies, including Delaware County Memorial Hospital, which is also on Lansdowne Avenue.
"It's not like that part of Delaware County doesn't have another [maternity] service," said Joanne Fischer, executive director of the Maternity Care Coalition, a regional advocacy and service group. "But if ob-gyn is a losing proposition, does that mean more and more hospitals are going to be ditching it? It is worrisome."
Peggy Wilkers, a labor and delivery nurse who heads the nurses' union at Mercy Fitzgerald, said, "We're concerned that the diverse community served by the labor and delivery unit at Mercy Fitzgerald will be severely burdened. . . . We question whether Delaware Community Memorial Hospital has the capacity to absorb the deliveries."
