Waaahhhhh!!! Jeanes Hospital
set to close its maternity ward . . .

By Diane Villano
Times Staff Writer

Just over a year ago, executive director and CEO Linda Grass sought to reassure women in the area that maternity services would continue to be a staple of Jeanes Hospital.
"At Jeanes, we are committed to being the maternity center of choice for the Northeast," Grass wrote in a Feb. 9, 2006 letter to the Northeast Times editorial page. "We believe that no expecting mother should have to travel several miles out of her way to give birth. . . . We are looking forward to serving our Northeast mothers and their families for many years to come."
Grass was responding to a published letter from a reader lamenting that, with the decision of Frankford Hospital’s Torresdale Campus to close its maternity ward, women in Northeast Philadelphia would not have a local hospital to help them deliver their children.
Grass had every reason to believe in her pledge. But now, one year and one week later, you can add Jeanes to the list of hospitals that have been getting out of the maternity business.
The Temple University Health System (TUHS), which has included Jeanes Hospital, at 7600 Central Ave. in Fox Chase, since 1996, has announced the closure of Jeanes’ Maternal Child Health Program as part of TUHS’ attempt to balance its budget for fiscal year 2008.
The maternity program will cease operations on May 31.
Also targeted for closure is the children’s day-care program at Jeanes, once the current kindergarten class graduates this spring; an adult day-care program at Northeastern Hospital, another facility in the Temple system; and the school of nursing at the TUH-Episcopal Campus.
More than 500 jobs will be affected — a likely combination of both cuts and transfers — throughout the health system, about 6 percent of the total workforce.
TUHS, which also encompasses Temple University Hospital, Temple Children’s Medical Center and Episcopal Hospital, posted a loss of $17 million in fiscal 2006.
While declining to specify the financial losses incurred by Jeanes’ maternity program, Grass and Gerry Oetzel, the chief financial officer at the hospital, called it "significant."
"It was a very, very difficult decision," Grass said.
It means the hospital will cease all obstetrical services. Women can continue to go to Jeanes for gynecological care.
According to the Jeanes administrator, with Temple, Northeastern and Jeanes all delivering babies, the health system has been taking on the burden as other hospitals have continued to phase out obstetrical services.
With the demise of Parkview Hospital in 2003 and an end to Frankford Hospital’s maternity ward in June 2006, Jeanes became a popular destination for mothers-to-be. Last year, the hospital delivered 1,260 babies.
The hospital has projected those deliveries to increase to 1,700 babies this year, about 1,800 babies in 2008, and perhaps 2,200 babies in 2009.
With the unit originally built to handle 800 deliveries for Jeanes’ primary service area, the hospital undertook a $500,000 expansion that debuted within the past six months to accommodate the additional deliveries. The expansion modified the maternity department to include six delivery rooms, two cesarean-section rooms, 15 nursery beds, five neonatal intensive-care beds and 20 postpartum beds.
"We increased postpartum beds by five," Grass explained, "and opened up three triage beds to accommodate our vast increases in deliveries. We had nowhere to grow in that amount of time."
When Frankford closed its unit, Grass said, a study indicated that Jeanes Hospital would have to roughly double its 16,000 square feet to safely provide care for the additional mothers and their babies.
"It’s all about the facility and its inability to keep up with growth," Grass said.
Since that would require continued financial commitments, and given that the department still had been operating in the red for a number of years, Grass said those demands "make it more difficult to put more resources into a program."
The hospital, she noted, also has seen a trend of pregnant women who show up at the emergency room in need of maternity services.
The chairman of the department, Dr. Neil Isdaner, oversees a program at Jeanes that employs nine obstetrical physicians, two certified nurse-midwives, 89 registered nurses, two licensed practical nurses, five obstetrical technicians and nine unit clerks. Jeanes is a non-union hospital.
At this point, those staffers will be jobless once the maternity unit shuts down in three months.
"I feel bad for the nursing staff. They are excellent nurses," Isdaner said. "Some came from Parkview and Frankford and will have to go somewhere else again."
Before making the official announcement of the maternity program’s planned closure, hospital officials contacted Holy Redeemer, Abington and Lower Bucks hospitals to explore job prospects for the staff.
"We’re really trying to encourage them to stay with us in the health system," Grass said. "They will have the full list of all the jobs in the health system, or any of the other hospitals."
Jeanes also has agreed to let the physicians maintain their on-campus offices, said Isdaner.
"For the physicians’ sake, it will help retain their patient population, delivering at a facility five or ten minutes away," he said. "It will be a great help to me and to the hospital, as patients will use more ancillary services, such as ultrasound and mammography here. It made the sad ending not quite as sad."
Northeastern Hospital, located in Port Richmond, will continue its baby deliveries.
Isdaner has mixed feelings about the impending closure.
"I would love to see it stay, but I can see the other side of the coin. Malpractice insurance is expensive, there is low reimbursement (for maternity services) from insurance companies, add in a building fund . . . we’re going in the right direction," Isdaner said.
Grass expects the vacated maternity unit to be used as clinical space. The cardiology and surgical programs are looking to expand to more space, with such advanced services as interventional catheterization, cardiac thoracic surgery and an electrocardiology lab.
Grass noted that such an expansion would fit with the Temple University Health System’s goal of growing more advanced services at Jeanes.
When the unit closes on May 31 — 41 years and three days after the first baby, a boy, was born there in 1966 — Isdaner will get to work investigating the creation of a one-stop-shopping women’s health-care center. Women could have a Pap smear, mammogram and bone-density test all in the same day. Other possible services could be nutritional counseling, massage, personal training and superficial cosmetic treatments, such as Botox. ••
Reporter Diane Villano can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dvillano@phillynews.com