LAURIUM — Nurses at Aspirus Keweenaw Hospital are trying to alert the public about last month’s closure of its obstetrics unit.

Inpatient labor and delivery ended at the hospital as of Dec. 31.

Aspirus announced in November it would be partnering with Upper Great Lakes Family Health Clinic, which is expanding OB/GYN outpatient services to its Houghton location as well as expanding services at the Aspirus Keweenaw clinics in Laurium and Houghton.

Melissa Helppi, an emergency department nurse and president of the Michigan Nurses Association-Aspirus Keweenaw union, said nurses had been hearing rumors of the OB unit closure in the community even during the summer. At the time, management had denied the rumors, Helppi said.

A formal announcement didn’t come internally until November. There had been no staff cuts on the nursing side, Helppi said. “Some people, for their own professional continuation of being an OB labor and delivery nurse, have chosen to work elsewhere, but the remaining nurses are being reassigned and utilized in different departments,” she said.

Aspirus is just one of many hospitals around the country that have had to end OB services, said Darcy Donnelly, director of nursing at Aspirus. The driving factor has been the difficulty of recruiting OB/GYN physicians and nurse practitioners and nurse midwives to support those services, especially in rural health care. After one doctor retired and another left in 2023, the hospital aggressively tried to recruit replacements to support labor and delivery services, Donnelly said.

“It’s just been very challenging to recruit to the area, so that really was the uniting factor to look at a new, innovative model for stabilizing and sustaining birthing services in the Keweenaw,” she said.

Instead of the care being provided at Aspirus, the hospital is collaborating with UGL, where a women’s health group of OB/GYN midwives and nurse practitioners will provide prenatal and postnatal care at the Aspirus Laurium and Houghton clinics.

“We will continue to have outpatient services like obstetrical ultrasound lab services supporting that prenatal and postnatal care and deliveries will be consolidated at UP Health System – Portage,” Donnelly said.

Annually, Aspirus had received more than 200 patients in the OB unit, Helppi said. She said the decision would have continuing effects on the OB nurses that wanted to do labor and delivery and no longer can, as well as the emergency room nurses who will now take up those patients to care for them when they do come to the hospital.

“I feel it affects all nursing staff in some way, just the kind of sensation that we were lied to that by lying to us, we were unable to clarify to our patients and the community at large, so we in effect were lying to them too, unintentionally,” she said. “So it’s affected every nurse at the hospital.”

Donnelly said the initial lack of word to staff had to do with the sensitive nature of contract discussions as the two organizations discussed what the model of care would look like.

“As those details were being finalized, there were rumors out in the community regarding the closure,” she said. “Because those details were not yet finalized, we were unable to communicate those details to staff. However, as soon as those contracts were completed, we moved forward very quickly in communicating the decision to the impacted employees.”

Once the contract was agreed on, she said, the hospital put out a press release and provided the same information to patients and employees. The patient information was provided one on one, she said, including discussions of the details through phone conversations.

At the time of the interview, no emergent care for pregnant women had come through the Aspirus emergency department since the closure, Donnelly said.

“All of the patients that we proactively communicated with that were in the care of Aspirus have been receiving their care in this community, and we’re very appreciative that they’ve been able to continue to receive that care close to home,” she said.

Helppi said nurses would have liked to have been approached beforehand for buy-in, comparing it to the situation surrounding the closure of Aspirus’s Ontonagon hospital last year.

Many people in the community still don’t think the OB unit has closed, she said, since they had been assured last year the rumors were false.

“People, when they do hear that we’re closed, are quite sad, because we’ve had generations of babies born at Aspirus Keweenaw– under different hospital titles, of course, but same building, same department,” she said. “A lot of nurses that have worked there for decades, that had even their own babies there, that are just really sad to see it go. It is definitely a need in our community. We do have a lot of people that live in the area that have larger families and had planned to continue going to Aspirus Keweenaw for their labor and delivery needs. So those people are quite upset, too.”