Community Memorial Hospital in Cloquet has spent the last few years training doctors, nurses, medical students and EMTs from across rural Minnesota on a life-like birth simulator nicknamed "Virginia" — and per reporting picked up by University of Minnesota News, that training is a big reason some of the state's smallest labor and delivery units have managed to stay open.
A second unit, the C-Celia Suite, handles surgical emergencies — emergency C-sections, hysterectomies, postpartum hemorrhage. Together they're the core of Community Memorial's MN ROSE program, a partnership with the Minnesota Department of Health built specifically to give practitioners in low-birth-volume rural hospitals reps they'd otherwise never get.
The equipment wasn't cheap: the full simulation suite cost more than $200,000, covered by a Trailblazer Award from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, with the state's Office of Rural Health chipping in for training costs and consumables so hospitals can send staff at low or no cost.
The problem the simulator is aimed at is well documented on campus. The University of Minnesota's Rural Health Research Center runs a Maternity Care Team, led by School of Public Health professor Katy Backes Kozhimannil, that tracks hospital obstetric unit closures nationwide. Kozhimannil's team examined nearly 5,000 short-term acute care hospitals from 2010 through 2022 and found that by 2022, two-thirds of rural hospitals in eight states had eliminated obstetric services entirely. "Obstetric unit closures can increase distance to care and put pregnant patients and newborns at risk," Kozhimannil said.
That's the backdrop Community Memorial CEO Rick Breuer points to in explaining why the simulator matters: providers who deliver babies only occasionally can lose their edge fast. "It's important that our physicians, nurses and support staff are trained appropriately for all types of labor and delivery care," Breuer said. Rural expectant mothers are roughly 9% more likely to die or suffer life-threatening complications during childbirth than mothers in urban areas, according to research cited by the hospital.
The program has since outgrown a single hospital. Community Memorial has been opening the simulator to unaffiliated rural medical centers across the state, and demand has been strong enough to build a waiting list — a rare bright spot in a landscape where UMN researchers keep finding more units closing than staying open.