If you live in the Pine Plains area and are pregnant, you have two options for a hospital birth: Northern Dutchess Hospital in Rhinebeck, 13 miles from the center of town, and Sharon (Conn.) Hospital, 15 miles away. While maternity services at Northern Dutchess aren’t at risk, the maternity ward at Sharon Hospital has been on the edge of closing for the last seven years. Now that Northwell Health has merged with Nuvance Health, which previously owned both hospitals, that threat has passed. “We understand that the availability of obstetrics is profoundly important, and we are committed to maintaining these services at Sharon Hospital,” said Sharon Hospital spokesperson Griffin Cooper. “Our goal is to ensure that future generations can continue to be safely born and compassionately cared for right here in Sharon.”
Under the merger agreement, completed in May, Northwell Health will maintain maternity services at Sharon for the next five years — and likely “indefinitely,” according to Sharon gynecologist/obstetrician Howard G. Mortman, who has been delivering babies at the hospital since 1991 and was instrumental in the fight to keep the ward open. “All my interactions with Northwell have been consistent, even now that they have ownership,” he said. “It’s profound, a mini miracle.”
Added Salisbury, Connecticut resident Victor Germack, a former investment banker who has volunteered financial consultation in the fight to save the maternity ward, “Northwell is well established financially, and I believe they will do everything they can to make this a success.”
Sharon resident Aimee Couture is in her eighth month of pregnancy and plans to have her child at Sharon Hospital. “Knowing that quality maternity care is so close, at a beautiful facility, is an enormous relief,” she said. “After all, it’s two lives that are at stake.”
An Uphill Battle
Across the country, rural hospitals are closing obstetric services. According to the 2024 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 43.1% of rural hospitals in the United States did not offer obstetrics in 2010. By 2022, that had risen to 52.4%. “Obstetrics have a high level of fixed costs,” said study co-author Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “There’s neonatal resuscitation, surgical delivery, anesthesia, specialty equipment, and dedicated spaces. It’s very expensive.” When a hospital has a significant Medicaid population, as is the case with Sharon, reimbursement is lower, so more babies need to be delivered to make it work financially. The national trend toward planned home births also means fewer babies are delivered in hospitals.
The fact that Sharon Hospital has now bucked the national trend owes much to relentless advocacy. In 2018, Lydia Kruge Moore had already delivered one baby at Sharon — “a most wonderful experience,” she recalled. But the day she found out she was pregnant with her second, she also learned that Health Quest, which then owned Sharon Hospital, had announced that it was closing the maternity ward.
She started the advocacy group Save Sharon Hospital, whose goal was to make sure it remained a “full-service community hospital, from labor and delivery to geriatric care,” according to Save Sharon Hospital’s mission statement.. Maternity services were at the core of the struggle. In 2019, when a regional merger created Nuvance Health, which took over the hospital, the closure planning continued, with a new end date of 2021.
Save Sharon Hospital earned community and bipartisan political support, submitting a petition with 400 signatures to state officials in Connecticut and New York as well as federal officials and successfully arguing before the Connecticut Office of Health Strategy, whose approval is required by state law, to deny the request by Nuvance to close it. That happened in 2023, but as recently as February 2024, Nuvance Health was reassessing its next steps. Then the merger with Northwell Health happened, and all services were legally preserved for the next five years, with great attention to the maternity ward. “It’s been a long battle,” Mortman said. “The community rose up as one voice.”
How Local Maternity Services Save Lives
Sharon Hospital isn’t the only area hospital with maternity services, of course. Northern Dutchess Hospital’s Neugarten Family Birth Center delivers more than 1,000 babies annually. According to hospital spokesperson Robyn Scarchilli, “The center offers a wide range of family-centered and holistic services, including midwifery care, water births and lactation support. The affiliation with Northwell Health is expected to strengthen and enhance maternity services.”
But proximity can be lifesaving. If you live east of Pulvers Corners in Pine Plains, or in, say, Ancramdale, Sharon Hospital is 15 or 20 minutes away; Northern Dutchess, 40. (If you live near Sharon, of course, the travel time is even greater.) Minutes can matter. “In rural communities far from hospitals, having to drive in potentially hazardous road conditions is not safe,” said Moore, who learned that lesson from direct experience. Her first two deliveries were uncomplicated. But her third was an emergency.
“My water broke in the car on the way to the hospital,” she recalled. Moore and her husband alerted Mortman, who was at the hospital when they arrived. The baby’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. “Dr. Mortman was fast thinking, experienced, professional,” says Moore. “She was born within the hour.”
Without Sharon Hospital, Moore’s options were close to an hour away — in Rhinebeck or in Torrance, Conn.. “Now my 2-year-old is thriving, but if my husband would have had to deliver her in the car, it could easily have gone the other way,” Moore said. “Even if we could have gotten an EMT there, would they have been experienced enough to remove that cord from around her neck?”
“I could easily rattle off 50 or 100 stories like that,” Mortman said. “I’ll get a consultation because of a failed home birth, for example. I’ve saved a number of lives in that ER. If maternity closes, there would have been countless losses and bad outcomes.”
Added Kozhimannil, “Our research has shown that when obstetric care closes locally, there’s a measurable spike in emergency-room births, with folks who are not trained in obstetric care. There are more out-of-hospital births, some planned but others unplanned because they are not able to get to the hospital. The [overall] result is less prenatal care and more preterm birth, the leading cause of infant mortality.” Lack of nearby comprehensive maternity services, she said, is a major reason “rural babies are more likely to die in the first year of life.”
‘Itty bitty but Super Quality’
In the fight over closing maternity services at Sharon Hospital, the excellence of care was never the issue. That’s true even though it is small, often delivering fewer than 200 babies a year. “We’re itty bitty but super quality,” said Mortman. In the last six years, Sharon Hospital has received the highest qualification, five stars, from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the only hospital in the state of Connecticut to do so. (Northern Dutchess Hospital also has a 5-star CMS rating.) Sharon’s maternity services in particular have received high marks. “Even in dire times, we have had the best rating for outcomes and patient care,” Mortman said. “We never wavered.”
The Northwell Health merger will help stabilize the hospital’s overall survival. In July, Sharon Hospital wound up on a list of national rural hospitals at risk of closure, due to its relatively high Medicaid patient population (top 10 percent in the nation) and three consecutive years of financial losses. Now that Northwell Health has taken over, though, that risk is reduced “Sharon Hospital’s new affiliation with Northwell Health [means] it should not be considered to be in the same boat as these other hospitals,” Germack said.
Mortman’s fervent hope is that the news that obstetrics is here to stay at Sharon will lead to more deliveries. “When the previous administration said we were going to close, it frightened patients,” he said. “No one is frightened anymore.”
Mortman is also hopeful that wealthy users of the hospital will provide more financial support. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to raise money for what is an essential vital service,” he said. He meets with Northwell every two weeks, and it is developing plans for advertising and marketing campaigns to get the word out that maternity services “never did close, and there are no plans for closure, only plans to grow.” In its merger agreement, Northwell Health included a letter with Save Sharon Hospital stipulating that it will “Sustain labor and delivery services at Sharon Hospital, with a dedicated effort to grow volume by attracting new patients within the existing service area and expanding the communities currently served by the hospital.”
For Mortman, the victory is not only professional but personal. When his sister was born, there was a delay in care, and she is developmentally disabled. He recently celebrated her 79th birthday with her. “She prayed to keep the maternity ward open at Sharon,” he said. “God was watching.”
This is such great news for women living in NE Connecticut and in Eastern Dutchess County.