The new funding aims to bridge gaps in Wisconsin’s reproductive health care.
August 20, 2024
By Olivia Herken (this article first appeared in the Wisconsin Independent)
A new federal grant aims to help bridge reproductive health care gaps in Wisconsin by sending more doctors who specialize in obstetrics and gynecology to train in rural communities.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive $750,000 over the next three years to expand its rural OB-GYN residency track, which launched in 2016 and is the first of its kind in the nation.
The Biden-Harris administration announced the funding through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in June. In total, $11 million has been awarded so far to create and expand similar rural residency programs across the country.
The extra funding will help places like Western Wisconsin Health in Baldwin, a small community west of Eau Claire and east of Minneapolis.
The hospital in Baldwin just expanded its labor and delivery unit as others around them have closed. Within 50 miles of the hospital, at least five others have stopped delivering babies in as many years, according to Dr. Dennis Hartung, one of the hospital’s OB-GYNs.
“That just puts pressure on the places that are still open, including us,” he said.
The hospital nearly doubled its birthing rooms, from four to seven. There’s a new, spacious water birth room with an accessible tub and a wall of relaxing LED candles behind it. There are now also designated postpartum rooms, equipped with rocking chairs and a bench that pulls out into a twin-size bed for a support person.
The additional rooms have already been put to good use since they opened two months ago. All seven rooms were full recently, with other patients having to be accommodated in the medical-surgical wing, which has also been expanded. On what seemed like a quiet Wednesday morning at the hospital, Hartung had delivered three babies overnight and that morning. Patients come from all over the surrounding counties or even farther, from Minnesota or farther east in Wisconsin.
“We’re happy to stay busy, we feel like we do a good job at providing a good service, but it’s also a bit of a strain on resources when you’re still a rural community and you still want to take care of people in your neighborhood, but you start to get people from farther and farther away pressuring the demands of your facility for their need,” Hartung said.
The expansion could not have happened soon enough, chief nursing officer Shonda Helgeson told the Wisconsin Independent. A decade ago, about 50 babies were born a year at the hospital. They expect closer to 400 this year.
“As we started construction, we were just constantly counting down to the new spaces, knowing that we needed them. We were regularly occupying med-surg rooms, which works OK when med-surg doesn’t need the rooms, but when both departments need the rooms, it becomes a little bit more challenging. So this space is much needed and much appreciated,” she said.
The hospital itself is a one-stop shop for the community. There is the clinic where patients can go for annual checkups and most outpatient needs, as well as the critical access hospital with an emergency department and operating rooms. The building, which opened in 2016, offers patients and their families a pharmacy, an eye doctor, a cafeteria, valet parking, and a fitness center. An outdoor courtyard space will soon be developed into a patio and garden for patients to use, too.
There are about 100 acres of land on the hospital’s campus, with trails where staff can take breaks and where the hospital hosts fun runs and community snowshoeing events. Patients can watch nature and wildlife outside their windows. Hartung said he hopes the hospital can eventually expand to add an assisted-living facility and an office building.
Rural practices often have fewer resources, both financially and in staffing, than larger hospitals in big cities. Hartung is only one of two OB-GYNs at the hospital in Baldwin, and they are both on call on average about 180 nights a year.
The Baldwin hospital may not be what most people think of when they picture rural health care. Hartung hopes that perception can change, especially for doctors-to-be.
The additional funding for the university’s OB-GYN rural residency track is a step in the right direction, Hartung said, but added he wishes the program encouraged or even required residents to stay in rural medicine once they complete the program. He said they’ve tried to recruit the residents that rotate through his hospital to stay, but have been unsuccessful so far.
“I think people go into that kind of a training with the idea that they’re going to go to rural practice,” Hartung said, “and the more that they can be exposed to it, the more chance that they’ll develop a love for that kind of a lifestyle and community-based care.”
Hartung said he didn’t get that experience while completing his residency, at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He worked as a doctor in the U.S. Army for 26 years before moving to northwest Wisconsin, seeing it as a good place for his family.
“You get to know people; you get to know their families. I’ve worked long enough in this area that I’ve generationally delivered girls whose mothers I delivered,” he said.
When you enter the hospital’s labor and delivery unit, you’re greeted by a string of Christmas cards and photos of newborns their team has helped bring into the world, a reminder of the benefits of rural medicine.
“Those kind of connections mean things to communities,” Hartung said. “They mean things to communities, and they’re meaningful to me, personally. I feel like that kind of stuff is just very meaningful. And you know, I’m part of the community, I see people in the grocery store, see people at the movies, and see babies that I delivered.”
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