Editor’s note: This is Part 3 of a series.
MARINETTE — There’s a bigger responsibility to do a good job in a small town.
“It’s a lot of word of mouth,” said OB/GYN Emily Ermis, D.O., Aurora Medical Center — Bay Area, who started in the fall of 2017. “We have more at stake here because this is our community.”
For these doctors, it’s not just where they work. It’s where they live.
“I was born and raised here, so that was my big draw: to bring my son back here,” said Alecia Sadowski, N.P., Women’s Health at Aurora Medical Center — Bay Area since January 2022.
The close-knit OB-GYN unit at the hospital underscores the commitment that Aurora Bay Area has to providing quality care.
In late 2023, the Marinette location was designated a “Maternity Care Access Hospital” to underscore the vital importance of its maternity services.
Marinette is surrounded on most sides by maternity care deserts, counties without hospitals or birth centers and where no obstetricians work.
The Marinette hospital is the only hospital in Wisconsin to receive the designation.
“(It’s) recognition of high-quality outcomes in an area where there’s also a very high need because of the distance to the next hospital with that care,” said Dr. Scott Voskuil, chief medical officer, Aurora Medical Center — Bay Area. “It’s not given to everybody.”
Local connections with doctors foster a closer bond with patients, leading to more personalized care.
“It’s nice to deliver a patient, and then six weeks later, you’re in the grocery (and they’re going), ‘Oh, you want to hold my baby?’ Walking around the grocery store, holding their baby, it’s like, you build that like bond,” said OB/GYN Kristin Kniech, D.O., Aurora Medical Center — Bay Area, who joined in August 2023, originally from Marshfield, Wisconsin.
The team oversaw 109 births last year, according to the Wisconsin Hospital Association. The doctors said the mix is about 70 percent of patients from Aurora and 30 percent from other hospitals.
The healthcare workers emphasized a strong mutual trust to keep things running smoothly — it’s something they don’t have to strive for in a smaller hospital environment compared to more prominent hospitals.
With a smaller group, they’re inclined to take ownership of their unit. Fewer items are dropped between shift changes, which results in better patient care.
“I think the nice thing that we have here is that we help each other without someone even having to ask at this point,” Kniech said.
The team provides a wide range of OB-GYN services — one of their main goals at the hospital is to make people aware that they’re here, in Marinette.
“I think a lot of people only think OB-GYN is for babies, and women’s healthcare goes beyond babies,” Sadowski said. “Women’s healthcare is menopause, perimenopause, contraception, painless sex and leaking urine.”
Sadowski said she gets many patients who have told her nobody has ever asked them about the issues she discusses.
“I think you grew up hearing, ‘You’re going to have your period. Here’s what’s going to happen. Oh, now you’re going to have a baby, so here’s all the education that goes with that,’ and then that stops, and it’s like crickets,” Sadowski said.
A lack of education exists in women’s health care because women “just cope,” Ermis said.
“You just kind of deal with things,” Ermis said. “You’re busy taking care of your children, and you come second or third or fourth. I have so many patients that they have been dealing with terrible periods, whether it’s pain or whether they’re so heavy, they’re frequent, or what have you. And they just don’t realize that, no, you don’t have to cope, you don’t have to deal with this, that there is treatment.”
“We’re delivering babies, but we’re also taking care of non-pregnant women,” Ermis continued.
Kniech chimed in after Ermis, mentioning that the Marinette hospital has top-notch medical staff.
“A lot of people think we just provide OB here, but the GYN that we provide here — we have a phenomenal surgery staff and anesthesia group that we can provide a lot of surgeries, that patients don’t have to travel down to Green Bay or further up to, like Marquette, anything like that,” Kniech said.
The hospital’s labor and delivery unit nurses have taken training to advocate new birthing positions that can mobilize a baby and help a mom who may be stuck in labor.
“We’ve really integrated that into our labor and delivery unit with our laboring moms, and I feel that that absolutely helps,” Ermis said.
Maternity Care Access Hospitals provide high-quality care to the communities they serve. On average, they have significantly lower rates of cesarean section in low-risk pregnancies (23.1% vs. 25.4%) and of unexpected newborn complications (27.3 vs. 31.8 complications per 1,000 births, respectively) than hospitals that did not receive the designation.
Lowering a C-section rate is essential in preventing pregnancy complications, Ermis said. The more C-sections a woman has, the higher the risk of increased scarring and increased complications with each subsequent delivery.
Both Ermis and Kniech perform VBAC, or vaginal birth after cesarean, for select patients who qualify.
“Some hospitals, if you had C-Section, you have to have another one,” Kniech.
They lean on Aurora BayCare Medical Center in Green Bay to consult the general surgeon and other specialties, too. The teams can communicate easily if a patient needs to see a high-risk specialist in Green Bay. They act as one large team, with Marinette as an extension.
“You get sort of the best of both worlds,” Voskuil said. “You get a smaller setting, close-knit community care in the local area but a seamless integration of the specialty care.”
Relationship-wise, the interactions between the clinicians and the patients are effortless.
“Here, we’re just one big family, which is kind of nice,” Ermis said.
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