By rssfeeds-admin A spokesperson for the health system said no votes to close the centers have been scheduled. However, nurses told KOIN 6 News they were notified last week that maternity services at Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital and Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital were currently on the chopping block.
Lisa Brown and Stephanie McDougal are both members of the Oregon Nurses Association and registered nurses at the Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital. The women said they were together at work last Tuesday when their Vice President of nursing confirmed the fate of the center was being decided on by the board of directors.
“It was just sort of mind-numbing,” said Brown. “You think of the threat to the services, to the community. You think of the closing of our family unit of nurses, and the loss of jobs, but mostly you’re just shell-shocked.”
Brown said the news was difficult to process, given the hospital’s nearly 80-year history of providing maternity services to expecting families.
“The patient population that we serve is already so vulnerable, and already has so many barriers to get care,” McDougal added. “We really have created a cocoon of care for them, prenatally, postnatally… And so, the thought of losing all of that was just overwhelming.”
According to the nurses, a shutdown at either location would increase travel times for patients and force other facilities to absorb care.
If closed, Samaritan patients in Lincoln City would have to travel nearly 30 miles to the nearest Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport, while Lebanon’s Samaritan patients would be left with only one maternity center in Albany for all of Linn County.
City of Lebanon’s Council President Michelle Steinhebel addressed the potential loss of access during a public meeting on May 14.
“I’m pretty concerned about that,” she said. “There’s 130,000 people in Linn County, 20,000 in our city. And if my understanding is correct, that would leave one birthing center for the county, and that’s located in Albany.”
Steinhebel added, “It’s just a mark of a healthy, thriving community for families to be able to have access to services like that.”
It’s a concern also shared by Brown, who told KOIN 6 News, “We serve Scio and Sweet Home, Cascadia, Brownsville and Halsey. It’s a really large area where we are the closest hospital and birthing center to them … There’s no way that everybody can go an extra 30 minutes or more to the next hospital.”
In a statement, Samaritan Health Services President and CEO Marty Cahill said the organization began “reimagining the system,” in early 2025.
“To be sustainable, we must have reliable and efficient operations that are able to withstand the challenges occurring within the healthcare industry,” Cahill wrote. “No final decisions have been made. We will evaluate these new approaches deliberately and carefully over the next few months.”
Cahill did not name any hospitals or birth centers, but identified key areas the health system is evaluating to save costs, including general surgery, orthopedics, women and children’s and urology.
Samaritan Health did not provide KOIN 6 News with current birth rates or the number of staff at the two maternity centers being considered for closure.
However, according to the most recent data from the Oregon Health Authority, in 2023, the Lincoln City and Lebanon hospitals delivered a little more than 300 babies combined.
Those delivery rates were on par with 136 babied delivered at Samaritan Hospital in Newport in 2023, but fewer than the 453 deliveries at Samaritan Albany General, or the 878 at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis that same year.
“We know that financially nationwide, birth centers are not really for-profit places,” Brown said. “The fact that they’re not for profit or profit-making, doesn’t mean that the community is any less deserving of access to care.”
Brown and McDougal told KOIN 6 News they hope Samaritan Health Services will explore alternative ways to save money and make good on their promise to gain input from the community.
Before any operational changes are finalized, Cahill said there will be, “time allocated within the process for additional discussion with our internal and external stakeholders such as staff, board members and the community.”
Meanwhile, ONA members have already launched a campaign to push back on the potential closures.
A change.org petition to keep the Lebanon birth center open has already garnered more than 2,500 signatures, as more than 12,000 letters have been sent to Samaritan Executives, calling for the centers to be saved.
ONA is expected to host a rally before Samaritans’ board meeting on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. outside board headquarters at 2300 NW Walnut Blvd. in Corvallis.
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