ROCHELLE — Rochelle Community Hospital and Dr. Kendall Vogeler of its Family Healthcare Clinic started prenatal/postnatal shared-care obstetrics (OB) offerings in January 2021.

Vogeler offers prenatal care for any OB patients from when they find out they’re pregnant up to about 36 weeks. Since babies aren’t delivered at RCH, care of patients is then transferred through the shared-care model to the UW Health Clinic in Rochelle and then to UW Health/SwedishAmerican Hospital in Rockford, where babies are delivered. The mother and baby then return to Vogeler for postnatal care onwards.

“I wanted to offer OB care for mothers because I did it in residency and delivered a lot of babies during that time,” Vogeler said. “We don't do deliveries at RCH, but I wanted to still offer some OB care. We wanted to bring it here to start offering that local service, because most pregnant women in Rochelle had to go to either DeKalb, Rockford or Dixon for that care.”

Vogeler’s main offering is whole-family care from newborns to the elderly. She’s been pleased with the turnout for OB care at RCH since the service started in 2021, with over 45 pregnant women utilizing the shared-care model. Some have used it for multiple pregnancies.  

“It's been pretty successful,” Vogeler said. “We can do everything here prenatally that they can do in Rockford with the exception of some ultrasound imaging.”

Many expecting mothers utilize Medicaid, a healthcare insurance program for families and individuals with low income and limited resources. Some other OB providers don’t always accept Medicaid, but RCH and UW Health do. The shared-care model also came about through Vogeler’s connections with colleagues at UW Health and SwedishAmerican. 

RCH is one of the few critical access hospitals of its size in the area that offers OB services, which are becoming more scarce, Vogeler said. She saw that need after doing a rural care training program and wanted to offer the service at RCH to keep patients local so they don’t have to drive 30-45 minutes away. 

“I grew up in a small town,” Vogeler said. “We never had a ton of services, so we always had to travel up to 45 minutes away for certain healthcare. It was always my goal to try to bring as much as we could locally at whatever level we could to keep patients here and offer them those services. The days of the old-school rural family doctor that does pretty much everything are going away because everything is so specialized now. The more we can offer, the more we can keep people here.”

Vogeler said building relationships with expecting mothers and their families through offering the OB service has gone well. She believes that patients feel more comfortable with her because she’s usually already their primary care provider beforehand. RCH and UW Health offer support for pregnant patients if they have concerns and need to schedule an appointment ASAP or after hours. 

“It's been good to build those relationships with the mothers, children and families,” Vogeler said. “The moms really like it because they already know us from before their pregnancy and they trust us and they bring their newborns back and we can get them everything they need. We have kids we've seen since birth and now they're three or four years old. We'll keep being there for everything they need.”

RCH has been working in recent years to raise awareness of the OB services it offers. Its Family Healthcare Clinic also offers other women’s healthcare such as birth control services. Vogeler and the hospital want the community to be aware of the offerings it has, and even if a patient’s needs exceed what it can offer, RCH has a network of other regional healthcare partners to help patients that start their care journey locally.

“We want to keep people local and healthy and help them with what they need and get them where they need to go if needed,” Vogeler said. “In rural medicine, we see a lot of more-advanced or complex things, but we have a good network and we can get people where they need to go if they start with us. I think that's important. With rural medicine, some people are prone to think that hospitals like us only do so much and they'd be limited to what we do. That's not the case here. We can do a lot at RCH and OB services is one thing I always wanted to bring.”