Before West Suburban Medical Center’s labor and delivery, postpartum and nursery units closed last July, doctors from PCC Community Wellness Center who worked out of the hospital delivered about 50 babies a month there. For years, PCC providers were West Suburban’s main delivery personnel.
With West Suburban closing the rest of its patient services March 27 — and announcing a limited reopening of some primary care services last week — expectant mothers in Austin still have nowhere to deliver in their own neighborhood. The next closest hospitals with labor and delivery services are MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood, or Mount Sinai Hospital and Saint Anthony Hospital near Douglass Park.
“It’s problematic that it takes longer to get to the hospital,” said Paul Luning, PCC’s chief medical officer and a family physician. “Patients don’t know where to go.” After West Sub’s family birthplace floor closed, PCC family doctors started delivering at St. Mary’s, and PCC midwives began working at MacNeal, which is owned by Loyola Medicine. “We love what we’re doing, but it’s terrible for women on the West Side to not have a hospital to deliver at.”
And while a little bit longer of a car or ambulance ride might be painful for someone in labor, it can be detrimental to those with more complicated births or sudden deliveries.
“When Maggie arrived, she arrived in a hurry,” said Don Harmon, president of the Illinois State Senate, of his youngest daughter who was born at West Suburban in 2004. “There are certainly circumstances where time matters.”
“There are situations in which an extra 15 minutes is something that is detrimental, as they’re driving past the closed hospital that was 4 minutes away,” said Dr. Theresa Chapple, a public health professional and former head of Oak Park’s public health department. “Those extra minutes can cost a life.”
The odds that a closer hospital can be life saving for some expectant mothers is even higher on Chicago’s West Side.
Before Manoj Prasad, CEO of Resilience Healthcare, bought West Suburban at the end of 2022, the previous owners, Pipeline Health, reported that over 80% of the hospital’s patients were Austin residents, and nearly the same percentage of patients were Black.
“Oftentimes when we think about labor and delivery, we think about the best-case scenarios,” Chapple said. “That’s really not the experience of Black people.”
According to a National Center for Health Statistics report, in the United States, the average maternal death rate for Black women is over three times higher than it is for white women. And Black infants are over two-and-a-half-times more likely to die from premature birth or having a low birth weight, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Following six neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side, Austin has the next-highest rate of severe maternal morbidity hospitalizations in the city, according to the Chicago Health Atlas.
Such stark disparities are almost certainly linked to disproportionate access to prenatal care and labor and delivery services.
Before PCC midwives were told in November 2024 that they would no longer have delivery privileges at West Suburban, an expectant mother could receive obstetric care, deliver a baby, and continue postpartum care and family medicine services from PCC doctors all at the same hospital.
“We really liked having our family docs, midwives and our OBs all in the same place because we really could be supportive of each other,” Luning said. He added that having those same services under one roof provides a deeper level of trust and comfort for patients. “That can get a little daunting for a patient who’s going through something that is challenging enough as it is, just having a baby. Trying to figure out who’s going to deliver me and do I trust them, that can be tricky.”
While some area hospitals might have the continuity of care that West Suburban once did, Chapple said many of those hospitals “are already taxed” and “one extremely complicated birth can end up costing hospitals an awful lot of money.” She added, “Labor and delivery wards are high-liability wards for hospitals and low-return when it comes to financial investments.”
West Sub glory days
West Suburban was once a critically acclaimed hospital for labor and delivery, among other specialties.
In the 1970s, Dr. Allison Burdick launched the hospital’s family medicine residency program — which lost accreditation last year — to train doctors who recently graduated from medical school in the specialty, including delivering babies.
Though the Parent Child Center was created in 1980 to provide prenatal, postpartum and infant care to Austin residents, it became a nonprofit in 1992 and a Federally Qualified Health Center two years later, allowing it to expand into a network of over a dozen health centers.
“The reason West Sub was so excited about supporting the Federally Qualified Health Center was because they were getting so many patients from Austin that didn’t have primary care,” Luning said.
Dr. Mark Loafman was founding medical director for the PCC Community Wellness Center in 1992. Around the same time, he launched a maternal-child health fellowship to train family doctors to do C-sections.
Luning said adding that fellowship on top of the residency program seemed innovative at the time and “I really think elevated the quality of obstetrical care at West Sub,” Luning said. “No question, in the ‘90s was when West Suburban’s reputation as [having] stellar labor and delivery really arose.”
Luning graduated from West Suburban’s family medicine residency program in 1998 and said, around that time, most of the people delivering babies at West Suburban were private obstetricians and family doctors who didn’t work for PCC.
“Gradually between 2010 and 2020, we started to see fewer private groups delivering there,” Luning said. Around the Covid-19 pandemic, Luning said PCC doctors and midwives delivered most, if not all, the babies at West Suburban.
While it’s difficult to say exactly what contributed to the shift in who was delivering babies at West Suburban, Luning said a few OB groups left the hospital to practice in different municipalities, possibly because of disputes with the for-profit hospital owner at the time. He said, while some commercially insured patients left West Sub to stay with their private OB group, “Even in 2020, there were an awful lot of commercially insured patients from Oak Park that would come to the hospital for their knee surgery or to deliver,” Luning said. “It wasn’t the same proportion as it was in 1995, but [the shift] was fairly gradual.”
Though Chapple came to Oak Park in 2021, she said a factor in the changing demographics could be because of the several changes in ownership of West Suburban over the past decade.
“As that has happened, services have started to decline. Services decreased as they struggled with finances that led to the hospital’s change-of-hand so many times,” Chapple said.
Harmon agreed: “I’m also wondering whether the for-profit hospital model actually works,” he said. “I’m just not sure the profit motive goes well with a community hospital.”