Haley Burns may be one of the last women to deliver a baby at Greenbrier Valley Medical Center.
The hospital will close its delivery unit April 24 as it transitions to a critical access hospital. Burns, of Lewisburg, is scheduled for labor induction on April 20, about a week before her due date.
After that, if Burns decides she wants to carry her baby until her due date, she and other women in her community will have a nearly two-hour drive to Charleston or a one-hour drive to Beckley to get to the closest hospitals with delivery units.
Burns said she’s grateful to her physician for the option to be induced at the hospital before the delivery room closes, but she worries about what could happen to others after the closure.
“I’m very fearful for women, not just in Greenbrier County, but surrounding counties moving forward,” she said. “Trying to get an hour to almost two hours to a facility just to have a child. It’s a very scary, scary thing.”
Women will travel for care, doctor says
The closure will contribute to what the March of Dimes and others call “maternity care deserts,” or counties with limited access to maternal care resources.
According to a 2024 report from the organization, about half of the 55 counties in West Virginia are “maternity care deserts,” compared with 32.6% in the United States. Twenty-two percent of West Virginia women have no birthing hospital within 30 minutes, compared to 9.7% in the rest of the country, the report says.
Dr. Samantha Chaffin, a gynecologist now practicing in Raleigh County, who formerly worked for GVMC, said women who live a distance from a birthing hospital but want to deliver there will often stay with friends or family or in lodging near the hospital as they approach their due dates. Others will schedule an induction.
“These are things that women already do all over the country,” Chaffin said. “This will definitely, obviously lead to an increase in that. The problem is we live in one of the most impoverished states in the nation, and a lot of women don’t have access to that luxury in terms of reliable transportation and things like that. So that’s a kicker.”
In addition to the challenges of getting health care, West Virginia’s high smoking rate and poor health contribute to a high rate of pre-term births, according to the March of Dimes. Thirteen percent of babies in the state were born pre-term, earning West Virginia a ranking of 50th in the country in a 2025 report.
Appalachia’s landscape contributes to isolation and less access to care at all stages of a woman’s life, not just pregnancy, Chaffin said.
Women reconsider living in the area, family plans
Greenbrier County native Sophia Rose and her family moved back to Lewisburg from Charlottesville, Virginia, in March 2024, while she was pregnant with the family’s second child. Rose said she felt “blindsided” earlier this year when she heard the health care system’s decision to close the delivery unit.
“I don’t think we would have moved back here if we were seeing that it wouldn’t be possible for us to have other kids safely,” Rose said. “And just the lack of comprehensive medical care in general in the area, is concerning.”
Rose got some of her prenatal care at Greenbrier Valley Medical Center, but she chose a home birth with a certified midwife instead of having her baby at the hospital. She said she would not have made that choice without a nearby hospital where she could go if something went wrong.
“It’s really sad, because this is a very vibrant, thriving community, and yet we don’t have the services we need to continue to thrive and bring forth the younger generations that we need to have a thriving community,” Rose said.
“I’m very conflicted, because I love living here, and yet I feel less likely to stay in the future,” she added. “I think the idea of living somewhere else is becoming more and more attractive to me.”
For Burns and her family, moving isn’t much of an option. Burns works as an entertainer at The Greenbrier resort. She and her partner co-parent their son with his ex-wife, who also has ties to the area.
“There is not an option (to leave), and I wouldn’t want there to be,” Burns said. “I love living here, that’s the thing. I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. It’s just that the fact that these resources are being taken away does make it difficult. Because you’re like, ‘OK, well, what do we do?’”
Burns said the status of labor and delivery in the area will play a part in her decision about whether not to have another child in the future.
“At that point, I would want to wait a few years, and I’d be closer to my 40s,” she said. “So I would want security for a high-risk pregnancy.”
Hospital system to restructure
Vandalia Health also plans to close the labor and delivery room at Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hospital in Lewis County.
The company, with more than 13,000 employees across 17 hospitals mainly in West Virginia, announced last month plans to restructure into two divisions, according to reporting by West Virginia MetroNews.
Changes to Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, are expected to cost state hospitals more than $1 billion per year and cut the number of Medicaid recipients in the state.
Recruiting physicians a challenge
Dale Witte, a spokesperson for Vandalia Health, which has owned Greenbrier Valley Medical Center since 2022, said the hospital will continue to offer obstetric prenatal services. Witte said the hospital has tried unsuccessfully for two years, but can’t recruit a physician for the delivery room.
“In this situation (obstetricians) want to be part of a larger practice so they have a better quality of life, not on call all the time or splitting (being on call) with only one person,” Witte wrote in an email to West Virginia Watch. “So we can’t just recruit one OB to replace the one who is retiring.”
Chaffin, the gynecologist, said it can be challenging to recruit physicians from urban areas to rural parts of the state where there are limited opportunities for shopping and activities.
Chaffin said another part of the issue is that delivering babies doesn’t make hospitals much money. Many of the patients rely on Medicaid coverage.
“There’s no monetary incentive for Vandalia Health systems to retain labor and delivery units, and that’s what it really all boils down to, unfortunately,” she said. “In health care, the people calling the shots at the end of the day are only concerned with money, and that’s the absolute truth. It’s very sad. I don’t know how we got here. This is not what they teach you in med school.”
She said the hospital should be able to make physicians competitive offers, but Vandalia Health gives “mediocre offers.”
“You have to make it attractive to people if you’re wanting to recruit doctors, and I don’t think they did that at all,” she said.
Witte said the issue isn’t about the pay package, but work-life balance.
Rural Health Transformation aims to tackle physician shortage
Jim Nemitz is president of the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, based in Lewisburg. It’s one of the state’s three medical schools.
Nemitz said the school will feel the impacts of the labor and delivery room closing. Its medical students will have to travel elsewhere to get specialized training in OB care.
“I feel the pain of patients,” he said. “Nobody’s happy about this situation.”
Nemitz said to increase the number of doctors in West Virginia, the state has to grow the number of medical residencies, or specialized training programs for doctors.
“What the studies show is that if a medical student goes to medical school in the state and then goes into a residency in the state, there’s like over a 70% chance they’re going to stay,” he said. “And so that’s been part of our success, is we work with all the hospital systems in the state.”
The school graduated 181 physicians this year. Of those, 34 were matched with residencies within the state, he said.
Physician recruitment is one goal that Gov. Patrick Morrisey has outlined in West Virginia’s plan for the Rural Health Transformation program, a five-year federal program that awarded the state nearly $200 million for fiscal year 2026. The state faces a shortage of primary care physicians and nurses.
Gailyn Markham, communication director for the state Department of Health, said the department is in the process of drafting applications for awards for the funding. The agency intends to open the awards to several types of entities to help place providers in rural areas, she said.
“While we anticipate that medical and osteopathic schools will apply for these awards and determine the placement of residents, Maternal and Child Health remains a priority,” she wrote in an email to West Virginia Watch.
This article originally appeared on West Virginia Watch.
West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
