Ali Block
speaker
886 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard Oct 2023
Ali Block’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What happens to a place when its clinicians are forced to leave?
What's it like to be pushed from your home because of your work?
And what becomes of the health care workers and communities that are left behind?
This is Scott Dunn, a family medicine physician at Bonner Health.
This is Zach Halverson, also a family medicine doctor in Sandpoint.
He works at a clinic across the street from the hospital.
It turns out the hospital had been losing money for a while, and the labor and delivery floor was one of the most expensive and least profitable departments.
The board's most recent attempt at cutting costs had been to redefine the responsibilities of the labor and delivery nurses.
When there were patients in labor, the nurses would work labor and delivery, but otherwise they'd work in other departments.
The nurses' union refused.
The hospital planned to fire them and then rehire them with legally rewritten job descriptions.
Meanwhile, the legal and political pressures in the state meant that a couple of the OBs were on their way out as well.
Of the four OBs, Hunsberger was the most publicly outspoken about the dangers of Idaho's trigger ban that went into effect after Dobbs.
The law failed to make exception in the case of ectopic pregnancies, a critical oversight, she said.
Hunsberger also headed up the Idaho State Maternal Mortality Review Committee.
The same week as the labor and delivery closure announcement, Idaho lawmakers voted to remove funding for the committee, even though Idaho's maternal mortality rates were among the highest in the country, at 40 deaths per 100,000 births.
For Amelia, this was the last straw.
So while the Dobbs decision wasn't the direct reason behind the closure, it had created a landscape that was hostile to maternal care.
For the OBs in Sandpoint, it made more sense to practice elsewhere, rather than fight a losing battle against the hospital and the state legislature.
It also meant that new OBs wouldn't be moving to the community anytime soon.
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