St. Luke\u2019s University Health Network will temporarily close labor and delivery services at its Grand View campus in Bucks County starting Dec. 1, according to the network.<\/p>\n
The pause in service has been made after unanticipated physician resignations, and will allow the hospital in West Rockhill Township to recruit new employees and make improvements to labor and delivery facilities, said Sam Kennedy, spokesperson for St. Luke\u2019s. All affected staff at Grand View have been given the option to transfer to St. Luke\u2019s-Upper Bucks in their current roles.<\/p>\n
Kennedy added that all births will be redirected about 8 miles away to St. Luke\u2019s Upper Bucks Campus in Milford Township, which is fully prepared to accommodate the additional volume. All other obstetrics outpatient services and other women\u2019s health services will continue to be offered at Grand View.<\/p>\n
Grand View Hospital merged with St. Luke\u2019s in July, becoming the health network\u2019s 16th hospital and adding 350 outpatient centers across Pennsylvania and New Jersey to the network.<\/p>\n
In recent years, hospitals across the country have been closing maternity units as the nation\u2019s birth rate has declined. However, both St. Luke\u2019s and rival Lehigh Valley Health Network have continued to invest in maternity and women\u2019s health services.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n St. Luke\u2019s Upper Bucks, which recently completed an emergency room expansion, opened its new Women & Babies Pavilion in April 2023. A Women & Babies Pavilion opened at its Allentown campus in 2024.<\/p>\n In July, LVHN, part of Jefferson Health, opened a women\u2019s health center<\/a> at the former Martin Tower site in Bethlehem.<\/p>\n There is an ongoing shortage of obstetrics and gynecology doctors that is only expected to get worse over time with only enough doctors to meet 82% of the demand, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration. According to Medicus Health Care Solutions<\/a>, a leading factor in this shortage is related to limited residency slots not meeting the number of doctors interested or needed to keep up with demand for service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Luke\u2019s University Health Network will temporarily close labor and delivery services at its Grand View campus in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,1057,182,139,432],"class_list":["post-37703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-health","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}