Our Town Brownfield: BRMC adding new birthing facilities

LUBBOCK, Texas (KJTV) - Many rural hospitals are getting out of the baby business, closing down their birth centers. That’s not the case in Brownfield, where they are actually adding new services and facilities.

Brownfield Regional Medical Center believes delivering a baby should be a beautiful experience.

“How often do you hear someone talk about that the day that their child delivered was the best day of their lives,” says Dr. Kristi Acosta, who serves as the Maternal Child Director at BRMC. “Well, we can be a little extra nicer, we can be accommodating, and really make it so that beautiful day IS what it is in their head. That it is an amazing, beautiful day and it is a beautiful experience.”

Elizabeth Tombs, certified nurse midwife at BRMC, says the hospital offers the much-needed peace and quiet that’s not available in larger cities.

“They don’t want a lot of foot traffic, so here, we’re going to be honoring that. An infant may have need to have some support with respiratory effort. We’re right here. Everybody is right here. There’s no transfer. You’re right here where everybody is. Dad, partner, whoever it is that they want with them is right here in the room with them,” Tombs says.

There’s another innovative way BRMC is improving their birthing center. They now offer Mom the option of a water birth.

“What Brownfield Regional Medical Center said was ‘Let’s offer all options to the low-risk woman’,” Tombs said. “So now, we can do water birth within a hospital setting. So you can have, the Mom can choose a low risk birthing process that honors her body and she can find the right position to birth in and she can find relief if she qualifies for water therapy and for water birth.”

Good communication with the patient is very important. BRMC boasts a multilingual staff- capable of speaking several languages common to the West Texas area. Spanish is just one of them.

“I am fluent in Spanish, and so I think that that makes a huge difference, when you don’t speak the language and (with) someone, you’re delivering your baby. I think, it makes things so much nicer just the look on women’s face whenever you’re able to communicate with them directly in their language,” Dr. Acosta says, “It’s just like this sense of relief, like, okay, it’s going to be okay. And everyone who is here from myself, the midwife, our nurses is someone who wants to be here, and believes with this vision and believes that we can help women have a beautiful experience.”

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