Maternity unit at Akron General Medical Center sees rebirth

The maternity unit at Akron General Medical Center is undergoing a rebirth. The hospital recently opened a postpartum floor in an area that used to serve as a short-term observation unit.

With the additional floor, the hospital now has 37 private rooms for new mothers and their babies, said Joy Burt, director of nursing and patient services for postpartum and perinatal services.

Before the expansion, the hospital had only 25 beds for postpartum patients, she said. During busy times, patients sometimes weren’t able to have private rooms or were moved to a perinatal unit after giving birth.

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”We really feel that the Akron community deserves to have private rooms when they deliver a baby,” Burt said.

The expansion is part of a $2 million upgrade to maternity services at Akron General. The hospital also is updating fetal-monitoring equipment and renovating the other postpartum floor and labor-and-delivery waiting room.

The unit originally was designed to accommodate 175 deliveries a month, Burt said. In recent years, 250 to 300 babies have been born every month at Akron General. ”We’re just growing outside of what we were built for, so we knew we needed an expansion,” she said.

For hospitals, labor days are big business. Industry experts say that women make the vast majority of medical decisions for their families.

Unlike many other major health events, the birth of a child is typically a happy one. So hospitals see it as a perfect opportunity to make a good first impression — and, they hope, create a lifetime of customer loyalty.