Q&A with Allie Ingler, chief nursing officer at Deaconess Women’s Hospital
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In December, U.S. News & World Report named Deaconess Women’s Hospital in Newburgh one of the Best Hospitals for Maternity Care. The facility was one of six hospitals in Indiana to receive a “High Performing” designation.
The Women’s Hospital also was named one of America’s best hospitals for obstetrics, mammogram imaging and comprehensive breast care by the Women’s Choice Award in December.
Allie Ingler, chief nursing officer at The Women’s Hospital, spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the evolution of the facility and the state of maternity care.
Tell me about the origins of The Women’s Hospital.
The Women’s Hospital opened in April of 2001. We started many years ago as a joint venture between Deaconess Health System and a large group of physicians who had the dream of doing something unique for women in our community, allowing them to have a place that was special and very focused on services primarily for women.
When we started, we focused on labor and delivery, newborn intensive care and female surgeries. Gynecology surgeries were a big piece of what we did. As we got the hospital open, it was wildly successful and even somewhat exceeded our own expectations, and we started growing. We have become a regional referral center for all of the subspecialties for women.
We offer an infertility program for those who are having difficulties with achieving pregnancy. We offer a gynecologic oncologist for women’s specific cancer issues, like endometrial or ovarian type cancers. He’s also a breast surgeon. We have a breast center. We also have a pelvic health and wellness program, urogynecology, so bladder incontinence issues and pelvic pain.
And then the biggest thing is our perinatal program. We’ve grown from a place where you go to have a baby to a place where if you have a complicated pregnancy, our maternal fetal medicine program offers very highly specialized ultrasound and physicians who are trained to take care of women with issues in their pregnancy. That program has grown so much over the last few years.
What makes maternity care at The Women’s Hospital unique compared to other facilities?
We have a unique relationship with the physicians and the employees because we’re focused on females and neonatal care that allows us to. The main thing is the family atmosphere that we have, the physicians, the staff.
I always say it’s a small hospital because we are unique and we’re a specialty facility, but we do a lot of volume, so we have a lot of people that come through every day, but it’s just a very close-knit family atmosphere. There’s a sense of camaraderie with patient safety at the forefront. We all have the same goals, and we’re working together to achieve those goals.
What are the challenges facing The Women’s Hospital?
Health care, in general, is in a tough time at this point. There are workforce struggles, which I know it’s not just health care. But we have started to see some workforce issues in our facility. We’re just really trying to be creative and making sure that we’re maintaining our culture and being a place where people want to come to work and stay long-term.
What’s in store for the future of The Women’s Hospital?
We want to continue to be at the forefront of innovation and provide absolutely the very best for our community. We are always trying to be involved with the state and the national movements. One of the things we participate in is the Indiana Perinatal Quality Improvement Collaborative. We’re always looking at what trends are out there in the state. What do we need to be focusing on? What programs do we need to ensure that we’re providing to our community?
How do you feel about the state of maternity care?
It’s scary for smaller communities. There are many programs across the country that are closing down because they cannot afford to maintain their maternity services. There are deserts, what they call OB deserts, in several rural areas across the country. So it’s even more important for larger centers to partner with the smaller hospitals and provide resources and reach out.
That’s one of the things that we’ve really, as a state, with the perinatal levels of care, really tried to do to make sure that the smaller facilities have the resources to lean on and to try our best to help them maintain because we really do not want those programs to close. We want patients to be able to receive high-quality care in their communities.
We don’t want to see our patients having to travel long distances for appointments and things like that because you have to come to the doctor very frequently whenever you are pregnant. That’s one of the major challenges for OB care across the nation.
Does The Women’s Hospital offer services that address postpartum depression and support for new moms?
That is one of the big initiatives, even at the state level, looking at mental health for women, substance abuse issues, depression, postpartum depression and perinatal mood disorders as a whole. We have a program, and we’re very proud of it. We have a nurse practitioner who focuses on that and some social workers who focus on just the women’s side of things.
What does it mean to be named a “High Performing” hospital for maternity care?
It was pretty special because [the list is based on eight measures of maternity care], things that we’re trying to focus on from a quality standpoint. It truly is about providing high-quality care. Are you doing C-sections appropriately? Are you making sure you’re not doing deliveries too early? Are you having any complications in your term newborns that you shouldn’t be having?
Another thing I’m very proud of is our breastfeeding rate. We have a wonderful lactation program where we provide resources to moms and babies 24 hours a day, seven days a week while they’re in the hospital and when they’re in the NICU after discharge. We also offer an outpatient program for moms to come back and get support from a breastfeeding standpoint because we know it makes a huge difference in the health of our babies.
Another piece of it was participating in the perinatal quality collaborative. That has been a program where we’ve implemented tons of really great quality projects, preventing hemorrhage after deliveries and looking at hypertension in our moms. In this day and age, you’d think it shouldn’t be a risk to have a baby because we’re so advanced in our health care. But the reality is there are still a lot of risks, even in this country, with having a baby.
So really drilling into what are those issues, and what are the things that we can do as a facility to make sure we’re preventing adverse outcomes. It’s been a lot of quality education for our staff, working with physicians to make sure that we have the latest, greatest protocols in place. Our chief medical officer has also been very involved from a quality standpoint, making sure physicians are in alignment with a lot of those recommendations from the state perspective.
It’s a very great honor because it’s a recognition of the great work the team has been doing. We have a phenomenal quality department that stays on top of the data and is making sure every month that they’re giving us feedback on how we’re performing so we can make adjustments if there’s ever anything that’s identified. This award allows us to see the fruits of our labor.
What does this distinction mean for expectant parents in the region?
I would hope that it makes them continue to have confidence in us to know that the facility really is doing everything that we can to provide the highest quality of patient satisfaction and high-quality care for our patients.