Memorial Gaining Stature in Women's Health Care

For one of the fastest shrinking cities in America, baby births are looking up.

At least they are at Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center, the city’s only hospital.

In 2010, physicians delivered 391 babies. 

In 2011, with the addition of Women’s Medicine of Niagara at mid-year, Memorial boosted deliveries to 478.

In 2012, based on their average of 50 plus births per month - Memorial will perform around 700 births this year.

“Patient volumes for all our women’s health services have grown significantly, with Memorial recording a 36 percent increase in outpatient maternity visits, a 47 percent increase in inpatient gynecological visits and a 100 percent increase in inpatient obstetrics visits during the past 12 months,” Memorial Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Sheila K. Kee said.

With the addition of Dr. Donna Feldman, and Dr. Renee Baughman, part of Women’s Medicine of Niagara, not only has Memorial seen an increase in obstetrics, but gynecologic surgeries have tripled.
This increase can be attributed in part to Memorial’s cutting edge technology.

According to hospital officials, Dr. Feldman, after joining Memorial’s team, took advantage of the hospital’s robotic surgery – where micro-incisions are taking the place of bigger incisions for all kinds of surgery, reducing healing time, pain, and increasing the precision of operations.

Dr. Feldman instituted robotic surgery in women’s health and now heads the training for the robot, the program itself and the committee that runs that program. As these cutting edge procedures, which are not available at other local hospitals, begin to catch on, other doctors are coming to Memorial for its robotic surgery.

According to Kee, a significant factor in the baby boom at Memorial has been the confidence shown in Memorial’s women’s services by Dr. Baughman and Dr. Feldman and by Dr. Daniel Burns, Dr. Roger Jammal, Dr. Jayaselvi Kolli and Dr. Julie Madejski, obstetricians and gynecologists who deliver babies and perform surgical procedures at the downtown medical center.

The increase in births and gynecological services is causing some growing pains. The hospital’s labor and delivery suite is operating at capacity.

“There has been a whole women’s healthcare explosion that has come about [at Memorial] in a little over the past year or so,” said hospital spokesman Pat Bradley. “So you run into some logistical problems with women over in labor and delivery who need to get over for surgery and especially emergency C-sections. Our volumes are up and Dr. Daniel Burns, who is chief of Memorial’s obstetrics and gynecology department, has been instrumental in finding solutions for this."

One of these is to build a new operating room on its labor and delivery floor that will have a Caesarean section delivery suite to serve the growing number of women delivering babies there. The 800-square-foot surgical facility will cost an estimated $367,000 and allow women who need Caesarean deliveries to deliver and recover on the same nursing floor.

“What comes to any hospital when your volume increases, is you must have more resources,” Dr. Burns said. “We have a new fetal monitoring system, which is state of the art. We are going to have a new operating room on our labor and delivery, which all equates to better care.”

Currently, expectant mothers requiring a Caesarean section delivery must be transported from the labor and delivery to an operating room on the ground floor of the hospital’s Schoellkopf Building.

“The average time to transport a patient there by stretcher is 15 minutes and can be impacted by elevator delays,” Kee said. “By performing C-section deliveries in the labor and delivery unit we will improve the timeliness of care, ensure the presence of trained maternity nurses who are skilled in fetal monitoring and promote the continuity of care to both mothers and babies.”
Pending regulatory approval, the new Caesarean section delivery suite is expected to be placed in service in early 2013.

“No longer will we have to run down to the basement to do surgery on our patients when they are in need of an emergency C-section. We will be able to run down the hall,” said Dr. Burns.

According to hospital CEO and President Joseph Ruffolo the baby boom will only get busier.

“The word is getting around through physicians talking to each other that the quality of medicine you can practice at this hospital is very good because it is a good, a very good facility,” Ruffolo told the Reporter.

They may come from afar – even wealthy suburbs - to have babies delivered at Memorial.

“My primary office is here,” Dr. Burns said, “but I have always enjoyed the Wheatfield area and it has always been my dream to have a satellite office there and it is just becoming busier and busier.”
The changes Memorial continues to institute, the team of eminent physicians, nurses and other care givers assembled, in spite of being in one of the poorest cities in America, and without any dedicated government funding, should be a source of pride for this community, a community with little to boast of these days.

In a few short years, Memorial has gone from being known as a safety-net hospital to one of the premier hospitals in the region.

Not a bad success story for a poor town and its hospital located in a poor neighborhood on Tenth Street.

As hospital board member Don King likes to call it, “It is the Miracle on Tenth Street.”

It may be so.