A new report shows 11 rural hospitals in Wisconsin including Ripon Medical Center in Fond du Lac County stopped routinely delivering babies in the past 10 years. The report by the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health said closures were due to the challenge of a low number of both on-call providers and number of deliveries. The report indicates that five of the 35 rural hospitals still providing obstetrics are at risk of ending the service, though none say they plan to stop it. Penny Black, data manager for the rural health office, declined to say which hospitals are at risk for discontinuing deliveries. Still, 56% of the state’s rural hospitals perform routine deliveries, compared with 40% of rural hospitals nationally. Nearly 99% of women of child-bearing age in Wisconsin live within a 30-minute drive of a hospital that provides obstetrics, the report showed. Hospitals that don’t provide obstetrics sometimes do emergency deliveries.
