"It’s easy to drive by the small one-story building, unornate in its details, that is Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe. The hospital was built in the mid-1930s, with a small extension added on in the 1970s. The minimal staff, with just one obstetrician, serves a population of about 20,000 in the lower Colorado River Valley region of Southern California, with many farm-working families. About 26 percent of Blythe residents live at or below the poverty line.
Nena Foreman, Palo Verde Hospital chief nursing officer, said the hospital has a history of uncomplicated births, though the severe delivery complication rate is 12.2 percent of about 580 deliveries from 2014 to 2017, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data for more than 1,000 hospitals in 13 states. The median among hospitals in all 13 states is about 1.4 percent during that same time and the median among California hospitals is about 1.5 percent.
“Our deliveries are straight-forward,” Foreman said. “We just do vaginal deliveries and we don’t have complications here.”
Foreman said in the past five years, there hasn’t been a deadly delivery at Palo Verde, though rates calculated by USA TODAY show the hospital has had high rates of severely complicated deliveries that could be potentially harmful or even life-threatening to the mother. The rates were calculated from hospital billing records, obtained from state governments, using a method developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The hospital has a level 1 maternity unit, which means it can handle simple vaginal deliveries and uncomplicated C-sections. Foreman said her staff gets annual training to refresh skills, such as how to effectively use the hemorrhage cart. If the hospital encounters something more complicated, the patient is transferred to another hospital, but Foreman said that’s very rare. The hospital didn't provide statistics on transfers.
In the first quarter of 2018, the hospital delivered 28 newborns – down from five years ago when the hospital had about 40 deliveries per quarter.
While Foreman isn’t sure why the rate of deliveries at Palo Verde has continued to decline, some locals told The Desert Sun they try to avoid delivering there, if possible. For those with transportation and the time to make the drive, the nearest hospitals are John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio, about 100 miles away from Blythe, or Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, 120 miles away." (
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