Clinic cuts deliver midwife changes

Nashua Telegraph, New Hampshire, October 31, 2006

By HATTIE BERNSTEIN, Telegraph Staff
hbernstein@nashuatelegraph.com

Pamela Berube-Peters felt rushed during her first visit to her female obstetrician/gynecologist and switched to a nurse-midwife, a happier match for the then first-time mother-to-be.

A Francestown resident, Berube-Peters was so pleased with her care that after her nurse-midwife, Cynthia Coughlin, left Dartmouth Hitchcock Clinic in Nashua recently, Berube-Peters followed.

Now the patient travels to the clinic in Chelmsford, Mass., where Coughlin and two other nurse-midwives, previously at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, are now practicing.

“Due to my positive experience during my pregnancy and birth of my child, I chose to continue to see Cynthia for my regular annual checkups,” Berube-Peters wrote in an e-mail.

Coughlin and two other nurse-midwives, three of the four full-timers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic in Nashua, joined Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in Chelmsford, Mass., earlier this month.

The three left as a result of a change the clinic made to its department of obstetrics, gynecology and nurse-midwifery earlier this year, taking the nurse-midwives off the call schedule. As a result, nurse-midwives have stopped attending births except when they occur during office hours.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061031/NEWS01/110310322/-1/ARTSANDLIVING

Colette's comment: This is a disturbing trend: clinics and hospitals cutting services or flat-out "firing" nurse-midwives. Usually the motive is profit (doctors create more "billable procedures" in labor and deliver)