December 26, 2009

For Past Clients:

Hello Friends and Happy New Year!  

May you all find health and joy and adventure with your growing families! The year is closing and we are winding down.  As with any ending, there are always little trails and loose ends to tie up, and sometimes it takes a while!  We will keep this website up for about a year where we hope to post links, news, and events.  If you have something midwifery/homebirth related that you would like to see here, you can email me,  Ivy, at <ivywhitewall@hotmail.com> and I will get it to the webmaster if appropriate.  

Some of the other loose ends include billing.  There are balances due out there and some are lingering!  CCBC would love to have payment on these as soon as possible so we can finalize our own outstanding obligations. Amounts you may see on your bill are for balance billing after insurance payments have been applied, perhaps a lab fee you may have missed, or a visit that slipped past you.  I can't express how grateful we would be for immediate reconciliation of outstanding balances due!  The need is pretty big right now as we try to finish up. If you have specific questions about your bill, contact Midwifery Billing Services, Inc. (contact information on your bill).

 

Send Payments to 

Columbia Community Birth Center

c/o Eric Fogle, Treasurer

PO Box 85

            Ashland, MO  65010

            FX 573.657.2125

If any of you have any books from our library,  email me and let me know what you've got. There are some titles that are dear, and some of which we had so many copies that you could buy it for very little if you want to hold on to it for next time : ) I bet there are other tags and tails I am forgetting, but you can let me know if there is anything you need from me, or anything you want to do for CCBC.

What a joy to see so many of you and those gorgeous babies at our party in December!  Thanks to the Board of Trustees for throwing yet another great gathering.  How appropriate for a fat little girl to decide to be born right in the middle of it all! I hope to see you out in the community, at the Farmer's Market, or as a client of New Village Midwives in the next few years!

Love to all

Happy New Year

Ivy White, CPM

Executive Director

Columbia Community Birth Center

November 1, 2009

Dear Friends of the Columbia Community Birth Center,

We are bringing CCBC to a close as of January 1, 2010.  We are glad that Missouri has made the practice of midwifery legal for Certified Professional Midwives and that our midwives can continue to work autonomously.  But, for our birth center, a  long and arduous search did not locate a midwife-friendly physicians who was willing to participate in insurance contracts, or any qualified midwives to meet our staffing needs.  With the new laws, we have outgrown the necessity of physician oversight of midwives, a model on which the birth center operated.  We hope the birth center can be resurrected in the future under a new model and perhaps in a climate less restrictive to birth centers.

For those of you who are still “on our books”, know that we can continue to do births in the clinic until the beginning of December.  After that, we will continue to serve our current clients for home births only, attended by midwives only, and we will not be billing insurances.  We can bill your insurance for visits until October 31st.  If you remain with us, the rest of your care will be for cash and your birth at a site of your choosing.  Of course, you could transfer your care to another provider in order to use your insurance or for any other reason.  Also, by January 1, Kim, Val and Ivy hope to have in place a midwifery service to which you can, if you like, transfer your care.  They are currently looking for a “home base” for prenatal and postpartum visits. Theirs will be a very personal midwife only, cash only, homebirth only service.

We prefer to think that CCBC is “going to take a long nap,” because we believe that the community wants this alternative and enjoys their birth center.  Our intention is to maintain status as a not-for-profit corporation and keep any excess funds in an interest-bearing account for future start up.  Time may bring the needed changes in the political climate in order for the hoped-for new birth center to open. 

Please know that it is our sincere intention to close the center in a

sane, methodical, and responsible way in which all clients feel cared for and respected.  We know that pregnant women need a sense of security about their maternity care and we will strive to ensure that clients are transferred successfully to another care giver or finish their care with us without a hitch.  Further, we intend to maintain the website for updates and an email for inquiries and bulletins, at least for a time. 

It has been a brief but truly successful run for Columbia’s birth center.  We feel that we have increased awareness about the out of hospital birth option and made inroads towards acceptance. Columbia is a medically oriented town and we have defiantly been the odd man out!  Yet, several times, clients have come to us on referral from their obstetricians who know that midwives do natural birth best.  We will have helped about 170 families work towards the birth they want for their children and have made as many friends.  We are all glad we made the effort and we are thankful to all of you for your trust in us and support for Missouri’s only free standing birth center.  We appreciate the great love you have shown us.

On December 11th we will have a pot luck Farewell Party at 7:00 We will want to see you and your family there!  We’ll keep you posted.

Sincerely,

Ivy White, CPM

Executive Director     

Columbia Community Birth Center