Certified Nurse-Midwife's View
My name is Julie Sherwood
and I am a Certified Nurse-Midwife at St. Luke’s Hospital. I moved to the
Mission neighborhood after graduating from Yale Midwifery School to work at St.
Luke’s. Given all the resources I had through Yale University, I specifically
chose St. Luke’s because it was the only institution in the entire country that
I found which offered compassionate and sophisticated obstetric and pediatric
care to both the affluent women traveling from Marin county, Pacific Heights,
and Noe Valley as well as to the underprivileged populations that walk to our
clinics from their homes in Southeast San Francisco. St. Luke’s is a model of
multicultural integrated healthcare.
While women with resources
and choices actively seek our care at St. Luke’s, we also accommodate a varied
population delivering at risk babies. Over time our local community has become
dependent on St. Luke’s as a safe place to deliver in an already overburdened
system. With the closure of St. Luke’s in 2009, 1300 families will be asked to
deliver their babies at CPMC. If the NICU is to close on December 31st, we
will be asking our patients to transfer to CPMC in just 2 short months.
It took me over 25 minutes
to drive from St. Luke’s Hospital to CPMC midday this week. Do we expect our
patients without cars, without adequate support, and without financial means to
make their way to CPMC? Dr. Brotman has proposed a comprehensive
transportation plan for the future. This in no way helps my laboring mother and
her family - not in 2009 and not in 2 months.
CPMC/Sutter's plan for
"consolidation," is misguided. It is a dangerous plan that ignores the reality
of treating an at risk birthing population. Laboring women will continue to
arrive at our Emergency Department expecting safe births and for the first time
in decades, we will not be there to attend to them.
Instead of treating St.
Luke’s as the troubled child in the Sutter family of hospitals, St. Luke’s can
be advertised as the poster child – the national case study for what healthcare
can be when talented providers and passionate community backed by bold
administrators and politicians cooperate to create healthcare solutions.
| 
