IRONWOOD, Mich. (WZMQ) – Aspirus Ironwood Hospital will discontinue labor and delivery services by December 31, 2025, prompting concern from staff about potential impacts to patient care and access. The decision follows the closure of Aspirus’s Ontonagon emergency room in 2023 and it’s Keweenaw OB-GYN facility, raising questions about healthcare accessibility in the region.
Sarah Trudgeon,RN at Aspirus Ironwood and MNA president,expressed surprise at the speed of the transition.”I think we all heard rumors and thought that it would be a possibility, but I don’t think we knew it was actually going to happen at least this quickly,” she said.
The closure stems from ongoing difficulties in recruiting and retaining a full maternal care team, a challenge cited previously in the Keweenaw facility’s shutdown. according to Trudgeon, the Ironwood department has relied heavily on temporary physicians. “We only had one provider and a lot of locums and traveling doctors coming in to help fill all the holes,” she explained, “and we knew that couldn’t go on forever.”
The loss of labor and delivery services may require expectant mothers to travel to Wisconsin hospitals, possibly creating financial and logistical burdens. “We are the only hospital within 45 minutes of two diffrent hospitals in Wisconsin,” Trudgeon noted. “There’s a lot of people that can travel and will travel, but then there’s some that either rely on public transportation or friends or family.They might have Michigan insurance, and it would be out of pocket to go to Wisconsin, even though it’s closer than traveling to somewhere else in Michigan.”
Aspirus ironwood plans to utilize emergency room space for urgent labor and delivery cases, requiring ER staff to provide childbirth care. This shift raises concerns about staffing levels and potential delays in other emergency services. “For now, ER staff being responsible for doing things that we’ve never realy been trained on is a big thing,” Trudgeon stated. “If they’re requiring an ER to be covering that, you would hope that we would get more staff, so it won’t take the two ER nurses and leave the other 10 or 11 beds.”
The hospital has announced that ER staff will undergo training over the next three months to prepare for the change. Aspirus maintains that its emergency department remains equipped to handle urgent labor and delivery needs and will continue to offer prenatal and postnatal care to local families.
