Memorial Health System, headquartered in southeast Ohio, broke ground on a new hospital Tuesday. Once built, it’ll be the only women and children’s hospital in the region.
“For the first time ever in this part of Appalachia, we're going to have a true women's and children's campus,” said Scott Cantley, the health system’s CEO.
The hospital will open in mid- to late 2026 in Belpre, a small city on Ohio’s West Virginia border. It’ll serve a 12-county area across the two states, where Cantley says the need for maternity care is especially high.
Maternity care deserts in southeast Ohio
March of Dimes, a nonprofit dedicated to the health of mothers and babies, labels 13 of Ohio’s 88 counties as maternity care deserts, meaning they lack hospitals with OB care, birth centers and obstetric providers.
Seven are located in southeast Ohio.
“Thankfully, we have a long tradition of moms having babies that are very healthy and everything goes really well,” Cantley said. “But every once in a while, babies need extra help.”
“For the first time ever in this part of Appalachia, we're going to have a true women's and children's campus."Scott Cantley, Memorial Health System CEO
When that happens, his health system has to refer newborns to hospitals many miles away, like Akron Children’s or Nationwide in Columbus, where infants sometimes have to stay for weeks in neonatal intensive care units.
“So now you have a brand new mom and dad trying to drive two hours away, living in a hotel or trying to stay in the hospital room with their newborn baby,” Cantley said. “And aunts and uncles and grandma and grandpa are doing the same thing.”
“Everybody's driving back and forth, spending a lot of money they don't have, to try to be a part of what they expected to be one of the happiest moments, that turned really sad or scary.”
The new women and children’s hospital will change this experience for thousands of families in southeast Ohio and West Virginia, Cantley said.
“We'll have a NICU right here,” he said. “Mom will be able to stay with the rest of her kids after she leaves the hospital and still come back and forth every day [to visit her newborn] because we're right here in the community.”
But increasingly, that’s not the case in other rural Ohio communities.
Ohio hospitals closing maternity wards
Over the past two years, 14 hospitals in the state have closed or consolidated maternity services, according to a count by the Ohio Hospital Association.
Hospitals like OhioHealth Shelby Hospital, which suspended maternity services earlier this year, said they were delivering fewer babies — not enough to make up for the costs of minimal staffing.
“We were seeing the same thing,” Cantley said. “We had multiple hospitals all delivering a few hundred babies each. Our deliveries had, over the last couple of decades, begun to decline.”
Something needed to change, he said.
“The trick is that rural parts of the state need to do it a little differently,” he said. “We don't have those huge populations that urban metros have, so we have to work together with partners and find new ways to make these investments and bring coalitions together.”
So Memorial Health System partnered with Akron Children’s to develop the new women and children’s hospital, which has since received $30 million in state support, in addition to federal funding.
Locals are already excited about the project, Cantley said. OB-GYNs are joining the team, and his system has seen deliveries increase by about 40% in anticipation of the new build.
“By working together, we're pulling that critical mass of newborn babies that's necessary to make this make financial sense,” Cantley said.
But he believes this investment is more than a good financial decision. More than that, it’s an investment in the region’s health.
For the first time, women and children in the area will have access to a local hospital staffed with specialty doctors like pediatric cardiologists, pediatric endocrinologists and neonatologists.
“Those are the kinds of experiences you normally only get in big urban metros,” Cantley said, “that we're going to be able to bring to this campus in Belpre, Ohio.”
