Obstetrical services to return to WVU Medicine Uniontown Hospital
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Obstetrical services will return to WVU Medicine Uniontown Hospital in September. The hospital closed its Family Beginnings Birthing Center in June 2019.
Hess
Obstetrical services will return to WVU Medicine Uniontown Hospital in September, officials announced Tuesday.
“Our mission is always focused on the needs of our patients and ensuring they have the exceptional, academic care of WVU Medicine available to them,” said Dr. David Hess, president and CEO of Uniontown Hospital. “Reintroducing this service to our community gives our patients world-class care close to home and makes good on our promise to bring key services to the people of southwestern Pennsylvania.”
Uniontown Hospital will offer the services in conjunction with WVU Medicine Children’s.
The Family Beginnings Birthing Center at Uniontown Hospital closed on June 30, 2019, after the hospital transitioned away from its partnership with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. At the time, the birthing center delivered around 800 babies a year.
Hess said he thinks the hospital can get back to those numbers and even surpass them.
“We’ve added on nearly 40 physicians in 2021,” he said.
The labor and delivery unit at Uniontown Hospital was last renovated by the hospital in 2015. While portion of the hospital that housed the Family Beginnings Birthing Center was closed, it was still maintained, allowing the program to have a rapid turnaround for its reopening in September, hospital officials said.
“The actual OB unit itself was in great shape, so we didn’t have to do anything physical to it,” Hess said.
The birthing center provided care primarily to antepartum, intrapartum, postpartum and neonatal patients on a 24-hour basis. The center included 11 private rooms and a postpartum area as well as five labor/delivery/recovery rooms.
The year following the center’s closure, the hospital joined WVU Medicine with the goal to rapidly grow and reinvigorate services to the area.
In terms of the obstetrical services, the patients that were traveling to WVU Medicine J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, W.Va., for care will have the option to stay close to home while continuing to receive care from WVU Medicine faculty obstetricians and gynecologists.
“One of our main goals in the WVU Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology is to ensure that women receive the best obstetrics and gynecology care locally,” said Dr. Leo Brancazio, chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology, adding that the fact that WVU Medicine can soon provide these services will be a further step toward that goal. “I am honored that we will be able to serve these patients.”
Last fall, WVU Medicine Children’s and Uniontown Hospital entered into a program affiliation to help serve the children of Fayette and Greene counties which gives providers the ability to provide an enhanced level of care to infants, children and adolescents close to home with affordable, accessible and comprehensive care.
The collaboration provides state-of-the-art, nationally recognized pediatric care for families in the area through access to sub-specialty care, preventive care, research and education programs.
Hess said the hospital will purchase a $1 million worth of the state-of-the-art equipment for the unit that patients would find at Ruby Memorial Hospital.
“We want to make sure mothers and babies have the highest-grade care,” Hess said.