Centra South Side Community Hospital To Close Labor And Delivery Unit In Farmville

By Charlotte Rene Woods, Virginia Mercury

November 7, 2025

Virginia’s South Side maternal health care desert is about to get a little drier.

Centra Southside Community Hospital plans to discontinue its labor and delivery services mid-December as part of a consolidation of women’s health care with Centra’s Lynchburg locations.

As numerous obstetrics or OB-GYN services closed at multiple hospitals across South Side and Southwest Virginia in recent years, hospital officials have cited low birth rates in rural areas and challenges in attracting or retaining specialists in gynecological and maternal health care.

Those strains were listed among Centra’s reasons for the downsizing in a press release along with federal funding changes that include the reconciliation bill Congress passed this summer — a law that entails changes to Medicaid insurance and hospital funding mechanisms.

Starting on Dec. 19, Farmville-area expectant parents will need to travel to Centra Virginia Baptist Hospital in Lynchburg — a roughly hour-long drive west.

Longwood University professor Leah Shilling-Stouffer had already made that journey in 2019 when facing a complicated delivery of her daughter. The trek, however, was part of her birthing plan with her local doctors in Farmville as she’d had a pregnancy with higher risks.

“I was so prepared and planning to make the drive and able to, but babies don’t always work on anyone’s schedule,” she said.

When she went into premature labor, she said she was fortunate her husband was able to drive her to Lynchburg and she “shutters” to think about how differently things could have gone.

By the time they arrived, her daughter was breech — meaning she was in the wrong position to be born naturally — and had to be delivered by emergency cesarean section. The baby also spent time in the facility’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Shilling-Stouffer said she worries about other parents who might experience sudden labor or for whom the travel is a burden on time or finances. She noted her own pregnancy required frequent visits to her specialist. She said not all of her neighbors have the time or money or reliable transportation to make the trip.

“It feels so wrong, like we are just leaving people in the dust,” she said.

Katie Page, a certified nurse-midwife who works with Centra, said maternal health challenges are ones “that we know won’t go away” as more and more patients find themselves 30 minutes to an hour or more from the nearest hospitals or birthing centers.

Centra’s Farmville obstetrics unit has long filled a critical gap in the South Side for reproductive health care. Page laments how the community will now find itself in a “growing desert.”

Still, she points to a sweeping package of bills dubbed the “Virginia Momnibus” that lawmakers passed this year. The laws support maternal health care workers through provisions like allowing midwives to be on 24/7 on-call duty rosters or special Medicaid enrollment periods for pregnant people to ensure they are covered earlier in their pregnancies.

It will take state lawmakers’ efforts again to address how less federal funding will continue to affect access to reproductive health care before, during and after pregnancy, she said.

In the meantime, Centra has softened the blow by continuing its partnership with Central Virginia Health Services, a federally-qualified health center (FQHC) in Farmville, though with thousands of Virginians standing to potentially lose Medicaid coverage, it remains to be seen the full scope of impact that could have on FQHCs.

And Centra stated in its press release that there are protocols in place to transfer patients in labor that might need more specialized care.

In addition, hospital emergency rooms are typically prepared to handle births. For instance the ER staff at Southwest Virginia’s Lee County Community Hospital receive training for just such situations, its administrator told The Mercury earlier this summer.

Shilling-Stouffer is thinking ahead about what the changes might mean for her local community. A longtime professor at Longwood, one of the town’s main employers, she serves on a committee that works to recruit instructors.

“We want to have people that don’t just come here for a year or two, but people that really want to plant their roots and start families,” she said. “We sell Longwood as a family-centric university for staff, but it might be a hard conversation with candidates if they have concerns or questions about hospitals.”

Shilling-Stouffer believes Centra administration’s assertion that ending obstetrics was a “difficult decision,” but said she hopes that advocacy from health care professionals and families statewide will encourage lawmakers to address ways to prevent more hospitals from making such calls.

As governor-elect, Abigail Spanberger met with Gov. Glenn Youngkin this week to discuss the transitions of their administrations, she reiterated her intention to address health care issues at the state level where possible.

“We owe it (to patients) to fight back against this and to see if there’s anything that can be done,” Shilling-Stouffer said.

This story was originally published by the Virginia Mercury. For more stories from the Virginia Mercury, visit VirginiaMercury.com.