Having a baby in rural Minnesota is getting harder
| Meet Virginia, a birth simulator aimed at preserving rural obstetrics | | Virginia a life-like birth simulator that can replicate a wide range of birth scenarios from a cesarean section to a high-risk breech birth. The teaching tool is meant to address a vexing, vicious cycle in rural health care. As young people leave small communities for urban areas, fewer babies are born. And that means there are fewer opportunities for doctors, nurses and other practitioners to keep up on the basic and essential skills needed to deliver babies.
And when that happens, hospitals sometimes stop delivering babies altogether, says Dr. Charles Kendall, who has been in family medicine at the Cloquet hospital for nearly three decades.
“A lot of doctors have given up [obstetrics], either because they retired or they don't want to do OB, or they don't want the risk involved,” he said. “That's really put a crunch on the rural hospitals.”
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