MaineHealth Waldo Hospital in Belfast is ending its inpatient labor and delivery services in 2025, the latest in a string of cutbacks in hospital maternity services in Maine.

Services will continue through April 1, so that “patients who are four or more months pregnant won’t have to change their delivery plans,” MaineHealth said in a statement.

MaineHealth Pen Bay Hospital, which is located about 20 miles away in Rockport, will continue to provide labor and delivery services.

A vacant delivery room at Calais Regional Hospital. The hospital ended obstetrics services in August 2017. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

While the birthing center is closing, pre- and post-natal care will continue at Waldo Hospital. It is the eighth hospital in Maine to close its birthing center since 2015. Many of the closures have been in rural areas. The most recent was York Hospital in 2023.

The decision was a “blow to the community,” said Neal Harkness, a Belfast city councilor.

“We are very eager to keep young people here, and attract young families to move here, but not having this service is a blow to those efforts,” Harkness said. “Not having a birthing center here is a real detriment to the community.”

A forum about the birthing center’s potential closure attracted hundreds this summer.

Denise Needham, president of both MaineHealth Waldo and Pen Bay hospitals, said it was a difficult decision, but reduced volume at Waldo meant keeping the birthing center there was unsustainable.

“One of the central issues is the consistently low birth volume at Waldo, which fell to just 109 deliveries in 2023, a 20.4% decline from 2019,” Needham said in a written statement. National standards deem that fewer 200 births per year at an individual hospital are considered “very low,” she said.

Maine had about 11,500 births in 2023, which is similar in volume to 2019, but significantly lower than about a decade ago, when Maine was recording about 12,500 births per year.

A decade ago, Waldo Hospital delivered about 150 babies per year, but the trend of the hospital delivering fewer births, dwindling to the low 100s, is not expected to reverse, Needham said in an interview with the Press Herald.

Attracting and retaining a workforce with such a low volume of patients had become increasingly difficult, she said. Doctors, nurses and professionals who specialize in obstetrics are less likely to want to work in a hospital where few babies being born.

“If they’re not doing what they were trained to do, the job is not as satisfying,” Needham said. “We didn’t have the patient base to support the service.”

With a low staff, doctors had to be on call every other day, and at larger hospitals, the number of days on call is greatly reduced, sometimes even just once a week or less.

“We know that many people in the community feel passionately that Waldo Hospital should maintain inpatient labor and delivery services despite the significant challenges associated with doing so,” said Syrena Gatewood, chair of the local hospital board that oversees the two hospitals. “However, the facts are compelling. Our community will have access to more reliable, safer care for expectant mothers and their babies if we partner with Pen Bay to provide this service.”

The system conducted a “monthslong review of the obstetrics program that included extensive community outreach and input,” including a public forum in August.

While there’s concern that closing maternity wards at hospitals is leading patients to have to drive long distances to deliver, that was not the case in the Belfast area, hospital officials said.

“No one who gave birth at MaineHealth Waldo Hospital in 2021 would have had to drive more than 22 additional minutes to get to another hospital, and no one would have had a drive of more than 46 minutes total,” MaineHealth said in its statement.

Still, Harkness said losing the birthing center will be a hardship, because in the summertime when the roads are jammed with tourists, it can take a long time to travel 20 miles, and the roads in the wintertime are treacherous and require slow going.

No one will lose their jobs in the MaineHealth system as a result of ending the services, the health care system said. All employees will either get to transfer to other departments at MaineHealth Waldo Hospital or will be transferred to Pen Bay hospital.

Needham said that outpatient services will grow, and they anticipate adding new staff, such as pediatricians, so from a financial standpoint, it will be “pretty much a wash.”

Waldo Hospital will also hire an obstetrics “nurse navigator” who will help families best utilize the health care system during pregnancy and post-pregnancy.

“Finances were not a driving force in this decision, and I know that was not the case for many of the other closures in other parts of the state or across the nation,” Needham said. “It was purely motivated by the need and desire to be able to offer a safe and high-quality program with scarce resources.”