A Chicago birth center is abruptly closing for the rest of the summer because of staffing challenges — forcing patients to make new plans.
The Birth Center of Chicago, in the North Center neighborhood, told patients in recent days that it planned to temporarily suspend services, said Ariel Swift, director of outreach and education for the birth center’s parent company Birth Partners Inc. The birth center will stop delivering babies after June and likely halt prenatal care in early July, Swift said.
Swift did not say how many overall patients the birth center serves, but said about 42 patients are due to give birth from now through August.
Those patients may now go to the company’s birth center in Burr Ridge, which is more than 25 miles away. Or they may go to nearby Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, which has agreed to take on the prenatal and delivery care for affected patients, an Advocate spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.
“Our staffing levels have been reduced to a point where it’s not safe to continue care inside our facility,” Swift said. The birth center, however, remains committed to serving the community for the long-term and plans to resume services in September or October, Swift said.
Swift said that the center has hired an additional certified nurse midwife but must wait for that person to gain state licensure before they can work at the center, and the center is in the process of hiring another midwife as well. Part of the reason for the sudden closure is because one of the midwives now on staff recently put in notice that she would be leaving at the end of the month, Swift said.
Birth centers typically offer prenatal and postnatal care and delivery of babies by midwives, without epidurals or surgery. They’re for patients with low-risk pregnancies, and birth centers must have agreements with nearby hospitals to take patients if complications arise during childbirth that require more complex care.
Part of the challenge of operating birth centers is that neither private insurance nor Medicaid reimburse birth centers or midwives at the same levels as care from doctors in hospitals, Swift said. That can make it difficult to pay midwives enough to stay in their jobs, and can lead to turnover, such as what the Birth Center of Chicago has experienced, Swift said.
Illinois lawmakers passed a bill last year raising the Medicaid reimbursement rate for birth centers from 75% to 80% of what it pays to hospitals for uncomplicated, vaginal births.
“If you look at trends across the country, many centers, not only birth centers but midwifery practices across the country are experiencing a severe midwife burnout,” Swift said. “One of the struggles we’re continuing to work toward is having sufficient insurance reimbursement for the care we offer inside our building.”
The challenges come as community hospitals across the state have also been closing their labor and delivery units in recent years, often citing costs and low numbers of patients.
In addition to the birth centers in Chicago and Burr Ridge, the company Birth Partners also runs a birth center in Bloomington and several others outside of Illinois. Staff members at the Birth Center of Chicago are being offered positions at the Burr Ridge location, Swift said.
State lawmakers passed a bill in 2021 expanding the number of birth centers allowed in Illinois from 10 to 17 and allowing more centers to be run by entities other than hospitals or federally qualified health centers.
A project to open the first birth center on the South Side of Chicago recently received a $3.3 million grant from the city to help renovate and expand the building where it will be located.
