Beginning this May the Auburn Family Health Center will be back in the baby business. That’s when a new partnership between AFHC, Gynecologic Surgeons and Obstetricians, PC and Bryan LGH Medical Center in Lincoln will launch.
An expecting mother’s initial visit will be in Lincoln with either Dr. Jeffrey Tomjack or Dr. Alecia Lovegrove, associates with Gynecologic Surgeons and Obstetricians, P.C. Both are graduates of the University of Nebraska Medical Center and both are home-grown Nebraskans.
“The ‘clinic atmosphere’ is what they were looking for when we were first approached about new obstetric clinic,” said Dr. Gary Ensz. “After the initial visit, mothers will schedule continued visits right here at our facility, with our staff assisting. Dad and the rest of the family are able to join the expecting mother, if so desired and hear the heart beat and see the ultra sounds without the trip to the cities,” continued Ensz.
And when the delivery day arrives families can rest assured that their baby will be delivered in a ‘birthplace’ that offers the latest in technology at Lincoln’s BryanLGH. Their state-of-the-art facility is designed to offer families a comfortable setting, specially trained staff and spacious, all-private suites.
The new partnership is born in part from a ‘philosophy of medicine’ that guides Ensz and his partners at the medical clinic in Auburn. It’s been almost 15 years since the clinic stopped delivering babies at the local hospital.
“My partners and I felt that it was better care for our patients to be delivered in Lincoln or Omaha where the hospitals have greater volume of deliveries and there is immediate access to specialized obstetric and neonatal care,” said Ensz. Obstetrics, like all aspects of medicine constantly evolves. The AFHC doctors no longer felt that they would prefer to have their wives delivered locally. “When you make that decision for your family members, you need to make that decision for your patients,” explained Ensz.
And now that same philosophy comes full turn back to the local clinic in the form of a new partnership with new doctors that specialize in obstetrics.
Dr. Ensz illustrates this evolution with this example: “When I first came to Auburn, we took care of most of our heart attack victims in our local I.C.U. (Intensive Care Unit). If they survived, they stayed in our hospital for three weeks before they were dismissed. Today, if we see someone in our emergency room with a cardiac related chest pain, they are immediately transported to a cardiac center in Lincoln or Omaha. Within the hour they can be on their way to the cath lab. Within another hour they can have a stint placed to open up the blood flow to their heart, preventing cardiac injury. The next day they can go home and within a week they are back to work,” explains Ensz.
“With obstetrics it’s a similar deal. Technology has changed. You can start out with an absolutely normal, uneventful labor and several hours later be in the middle of an obstetric emergency without all of the professional staffing (obstetricians, anesthesiologists, neonatologists, perinato logists, pediatric surgeons) that you have at a bigger hospital. Nor do you have the facilities such as a neonatal ICU to deal immediately with a critically sick infant,” said Ensz.