We, The undersigned members of the Chula Vista Healthcare Community, strongly urge that the planned closure of the maternity unit of Scripps Mercy Hospital Chula Vista be put to a halt. We need the San Diego Board of Supervisors and SANDAG to help us plan for short and long term solutions to fill the need for full service acute care hospital in the South Bay, and that they insist Scripps provide long term expansion plan for CV campus to upgrade facilities to meet code, and expand capacity to meet current and projected future community needs. If Scripps is unable/unwilling to upgrade and expand, find alternative hospital system to manage as there is ongoing community need for a full service hospital in this location.

Scripps Mercy Hospital Chula Vista provides maternity care in an underserved border community, in an urban location uniquely accessible to a patients via public transit.The proposed consolidated unit in San Diego is 1.5 hrs away by transit. Closure of the unit will particularly endanger the health of low-income women and infants of color.
• Closure of the SMHCV unit will leave Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center the sole maternity unit for a population of over 500,000 in South San Diego County as well as the cross-border communities living in both San Diego and Tijuana.
• SMHCV, with the San Ysidro Health Center FQHC, sponsors the Scripps Family Practice Residency Program, which for the past 20 years has trained family physicians with a mission to underserved communities. ACGME accreditation, which requires continuity care of obstetrical patients through delivery, will be jeopardized when patients cannot travel to the consolidated maternity unit. This will worsen the primary care physician shortage.
• Loss of labor and delivery and postpartum nurses, representing decades of specialized experience, will exacerbate the critical shortage of experienced RNs.
• Emergency room staff, already overstretched, will need to evaluate and stabilize laboring mothers and their infants without labor and delivery services available, and will no longer have the support of neonatal resuscitation personnel for ill neonates. Patient care and safety will suffer; moral injury and burnout for the ER team will increase.
• Underutilization statistics inaccurately reflect the bed usage. The total number of beds is based on a previous rehabilitation unit licensure with two- or four-bed room occupancy, not single-occupancy labor rooms and mother-baby dyad rooming.
• Alternatives to closure exist to preserve access to care, such as conversion of labor and delivery rooms to labor/delivery/postpartum rooms, converting some postpartum rooms to medical beds or cross training of staff.