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Childress Hospital Among Shrinking Number Of Panhandle Facilities Still Delivering Babies

Rene Asmussen
/
CC0 Creative Commons

The Texas Tribunerecently profiled the Regional Medical Center in Childress as one of a shrinking number of medical facilities in the rural Texas Panhandle that still has the capacity to deliver babies.

The Medical Center’s labor and delivery unit delivers roughly 200 babies per year.

If the Childress center were to shut down, mothers in the southeast Panhandle would be forced to travel over 100 miles to have their babies delivered.

That’s why Childress is adamant about keeping the labor and delivery unit running, despite the costs.

The hospital’s CEO John Henderson explained, “If we were not delivering babies, mothers in labor would . . . be trying to get to Amarillo or Lubbock and laboring in the back of ambulances.”

However, the Childress hospital is still not able to handle high-risk complications. Instead, they try to foresee those issues and send mothers to larger hospitals.