Quick Take
Due to ongoing staffing issues in its labor and delivery unit, Watsonville Community Hospital temporarily closed its neonatal intensive care unit last month. Interim CEO Tim Moran told Lookout that a reopening is still weeks away as hospital leadership works to recruit more nurses.
➤ Para leer el artículo en español, haga clic aquí.
Watsonville Community Hospital’s intensive care nursery has been closed since mid-July because of a nursing shortage, and hospital leadership say they are still weeks away from reopening it.
Interim CEO Tim Moran told Lookout that a shortage in the labor and delivery unit’s nursing staff forced the temporary closure — a problem, he said, that began before he replaced former CEO Stephen Gray.
The intensive care nursery functions as the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. NICUs are ranked by level of care, similar to trauma centers.
Watsonville’s is a Level II unit, providing intermediate care to babies born at 32 weeks old or later who may have mild breathing and feeding problems, and stabilizing more premature infants (born before 32 weeks) before transferring them to a higher-level hospital.
Santa Cruz’s Dominican Hospital has a Level III NICU, equipped for more critical cases and babies born before 32 weeks; Sutter Maternity & Surgery Center of Santa Cruz does not have a NICU.
The closure matters beyond Watsonville: Roughly 31% of babies born in Santa Cruz County are delivered at Watsonville Community Hospital, just ahead of Dominican’s 29%. A large portion of the hospital’s birthing mothers are Latina, Spanish-speaking, with low-to-moderate incomes, based in Watsonville and the Pajaro Valley.
The hospital averages about 60 deliveries per month. In June, there were 65 deliveries, according to a report from the hospital’s chief financial officer last month.
Before Moran took over, the labor and delivery unit was already short-staffed; Gray, before his departure, had recruited six new nurses — but two lacked proper certification, Moran said.
The short-term solution was to shift the few nurses working in the intensive care nursery to the labor and delivery unit to provide support to that team, Moran said.
“With the present staffing that we have, we’re not able to operate both at the same time,” said Moran. “So, until we’re able to stabilize the staffing, my direction is to keep the NICU closed and provide the safest level of care we can for the women that come here for delivery.”
Board chair Tony Nuñez said the closure was an executive decision, not the board’s, and wasn’t driven by finances.
“If the board wanted to do that, we would have that discussion out in public, where the public can hear our reasoning for that and hear the strategy as to why we would want to do that,” said Nuñez.
At last month’s hospital board meeting, several nurses and pediatric hospitalists expressed their concerns about the closure’s impact on patients. Sylvia Perez, a charge nurse for the intensive care nursery, said that in her 26 years at the hospital it has never before been unable to care for babies within its scope.
Pediatric hospitalist Tendo Kironde said that the lack of an effective plan for diverting labor and delivery “has caused a lot of stress as we continue to have deliveries that are high-risk and we do not have the resources to provide for them.”
Other doctors and pediatric hospitalists have told Lookout the temporary closure does affect the level of care because if a baby is having challenges in the first few hours or days of life, they won’t have the ability to manage or stabilize them at the hospital.
Moran told Lookout that if there are babies experiencing health issues, the hospital has transfer arrangements with nearby hospitals, including Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz and Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, which is 23 miles south of Watsonville.
If there is a much more critical case, patients can also be transferred to the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University in Palo Alto as part of the ongoing partnership between the two facilities.
Watsonville’s intensive care nursery on average cares for one patient per day, according to Moran, and up to eight patients monthly.
In July, the hospital had five infant transfers, a number that typically fluctuates per month. The hospital has had to transfer infant patients to other hospitals at least 16 times in 2026. Even with the temporary closure, Moran said, there hasn’t been an influx in transfers.
Moran said that the hospital has short- and long-term plans to address the ongoing staffing issues. But he added that it’s difficult to find experienced and qualified labor and delivery nurses.
“It’s not just our problem,” he said. “It exists with the other hospitals in the area, too.”
What also makes it hard to recruit new staff — nurses and physicians, alike — into the area is the cost of living, said Nuñez. For a fourth year in a row, Santa Cruz County was named the country’s least-affordable rental market.
Another goal is to make sure the current labor and delivery nurses are up to speed with their core competencies — essential skills needed to provide care to patients — and of skills utilized in a labor and delivery unit, said Moran.
“It lessens the reliance on NICU nurses to assist in normal newborn deliveries,” said Moran.
But a reopening of the intensive care nursery is still weeks away. Moran did not provide Lookout with an exact date for when the unit would reopen.
He said it depends on finding qualified nurses to fill those vacancies. Once that happens, they still need to be onboarded and orient themselves to the hospital’s procedures — a process that could take up to three weeks.
“We’re trying to do the right thing for our patients and trying to get through this staffing challenge as quickly as we can, so we can get back to our regular course of what we do,” said Moran.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
