In 2020, amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, the labor and delivery unit at Windham Hospital was shuttered.<\/p>\n
The hospital\u2019s owner cited low demand and rising costs as their reasons for closing the unit. A three-year saga ensued, with advocates and community organizers raising concerns about access to care for area residents, and hospital officials insisting that dropping birthrates in the region required consolidation of services to other facilities, primarily Backus Hospital in Norwich, about 17 miles away.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 2015, there was an OBGYN practice that was based out in the hospital that moved to Manchester, so the thought process is that a lot of people followed them to Manchester,\u201d explains Bryce Turner \u201926 (CLAS). \u201cThey were claiming that there just weren’t enough births. But the births didn’t start to truly drop off until after the practice left. So, it’s like a chicken or egg situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2023, the state\u2019s Office of Health Strategy finalized the terms of the unit\u2019s closure \u2013 it\u2019s now been nearly five years since a baby has been born at Windham Hospital.<\/p>\n
The trend toward consolidated medical services in rural communities, and maternal health care in particular, isn\u2019t new or limited to Connecticut. A 2020 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association<\/a> found that 53 rural counties nationwide lost obstetrics care from 2014 to 2018 \u2013 and 1,045 rural counties never had hospitals with obstetrics services in the first place.<\/p>\n But when it comes to health care decision making, how do we choose who gets care and who doesn\u2019t?<\/p>\n And how do those decisions impact actual people?<\/p>\n The answers to those questions are something that Turner wants to understand, and he\u2019s doing so by focusing on the end of birthing services at Windham Hospital.<\/p>\n Who We Are<\/strong><\/p>\n Turner grew up in Newington, and originally came to UConn on a pre-med track.<\/p>\n \u201cBut as I went along in my first two years and got experience working in a clinical setting, I was like, this is really cool, but not for me,\u201d Turner says. \u201cMy goals in being a clinician were to make changes in the health care system. And after being in those spaces, I realized that it’s really, really difficult to do that from within the space when you have to deal with the day-to-day of patients and insurance and everything like that.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd there are some amazing people out there who somehow manage to do that. But I knew that probably wasn’t going to be my path.\u201d<\/p>\n As a sophomore in high school, he had the opportunity to take an anthropology course at Central Connecticut State University, which helped solidify for him what he wanted to ultimately study in college.<\/p>\n \u201cI love cultures and languages and that sort of thing,\u201d he says. \u201cBut once I actually took those introductory courses, I learned it\u2019s so much more than that. It’s truly an in-depth study of who we are as human beings, and learning to break out of that relativistic way of thinking about the world and other cultures just opened my mind to everything. That’s really what made me stick with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Turner chose UConn for the wide array of opportunities offered \u2013 which he says turned out to be even more numerous than he first thought. The University\u2019s anthropology department is strong, he says; its music program \u2013 he\u2019s also a singer \u2013 is accessible even for non-majors; there are hundreds of clubs \u2013 he\u2019s the president of his acapella group, A Completely Different Note<\/a> \u2013 and it has a variety of scholarly programs designed to help undergraduate students pursue research and academic interests outside of their coursework.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I decided on UConn, I didn’t even fully comprehend how many different opportunities there are here,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause I’m involved in so much now that I wouldn’t have been able to do at another institution.\u201d<\/p>\n An honors student, Turner is studying in the FastTrack Master of Public Health program<\/a>. He anticipates leaving UConn after five years with two undergraduate degrees \u2013 in anthropology and molecular and cell biology \u2013 which he expects to complete this spring, and an MPH.<\/p>\n Since his first year at UConn, he\u2019s been working in the Experimental Anthropology Lab<\/a>, which uses scientific methods to study human culture in real-life settings, designing experiments to test phenomena in addition to the traditional ethnographic methods employed by most anthropologists. This past summer, Turner traveled to Mauritius with the lab to assist on anthropological and neuroscientific research looking at brainwaves during religious chanting.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s in his academic home \u2013 medical anthropology, which studies the human experience of health, illness and healing within cultural, social, and political contexts \u2013 that he\u2019s launched his own health care exploration.<\/p>\n What Kind of Burden?<\/strong><\/p>\n When it came time to start thinking about his honors thesis work, time spent volunteering in rural Appalachia set his framework.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a lot of parts of the country, particularly in Appalachia, rural maternal health care is a big issue,\u201d Turner says. \u201cI had done a lot of writing my freshman year, doing a lot of literature research about it. But West Virginia is pretty far from here. How can I make this more local?\u201d<\/p>\n He heard about the unit closure at Windham Hospital through local news sources.<\/p>\n \u201cTo people in most of the U.S., Willimantic would not be considered that rural,\u201d he says. \u201cHere in Connecticut, when you’re in Willimantic, it’s urban, but you step five feet outside, and you’re in the middle of the woods.\u201d<\/p>\n The March of Dimes doesn\u2019t consider Windham County<\/a> a \u201cmaternity care desert,\u201d Turner notes, but getting to a hospital with a labor and delivery unit from the greater Willimantic area, in a state with limited public transportation infrastructure, might be manageable, if more time consuming, in a normal pregnancy.<\/p>\n \u201cBut when there are complications, and when you do need to be going to the hospital more regularly, because you need to see a more specialized clinician, what kind of burden is that placing on you?\u201d Turner asks.<\/p>\n That\u2019s just one of the aspects of the unit closing that Turner plans to investigate over the next several months.<\/p>\n \u201cThe goal of this project is, within the medical anthropology context, to really look at people\u2019s lived experiences,\u201d Turner explains, and he hopes to do that by seeing out people who have given birth in Willimantic within the last 10 years.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the justifications that the hospital used for closing the unit was declining birth rates, and that decline started pretty steeply in 2015,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, I wanted to reach back at least as far as that to understand if it was that women were choosing to go elsewhere, or if truly there weren\u2019t that many kids being born in Willimantic.\u201d<\/p>\n Census data, Turner notes, isn\u2019t overly specific. And the context of what was happening with overall access to care at the time could also be a factor.<\/p>\n His goal is also to speak with health care providers, community advocates, state officials, and hospital officials in an attempt to paint a fuller anthropological picture of the last 10 years of maternal health access in Willimantic \u2013 something that doesn\u2019t currently exist. There isn\u2019t any existing academic literature that\u2019s specifically looked at the anthropological impact of this closure, Turner says.<\/p>\n His work is supported by an IDEA Grant<\/a> from the UConn Office of Undergraduate Research. The IDEA Grant program awards funding to support student-designed and student-led projects, including creative endeavors, community service initiatives, entrepreneurial ventures, research projects, and other original and innovative projects.<\/p>\n