Ramsay Cairns Private Hospital announced this week that they have made the difficult decision to close their Cairns maternity service from 1 November 2023. Ramsay Health Care will be contacting women affected by the closure from today.
Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service operates a comprehensive and safe maternity and birthing service for women across Far North Queensland.
The Health Service is working closely with Ramsay Health Care to methodically and safely transition maternity services for women who were planning to birth at the private hospital.
The Health Service provides a well-resourced service that provides exemplar and safe care for mothers and their babies.
We are proud of the maternity and obstetric services we provide to Far North Queenslanders, and expectant mothers should feel confident that they will always be in good hands at our facilities.
On average each month, 187 babies are born at Cairns Hospital and each year more than 2,700 babies are safely delivered across our hospitals.
We provide birthing services at Cairns, Innisfail, Atherton and Mareeba Hospitals.
We have a high level of expertise in birthing as well as before and after birth care and support. Additionally, Cairns Hospital has a Special Care Nursery for sick and premature babies.
We will be receiving additional resources for staffing and capital infrastructure to assist with the additional patients. We will be expanding our staffing to help us care for the women and babies that choose to come to our hospitals.
This will – of course - include employing extra staff, and recruitment is already underway.
We are proud of the work our teams do across our Health Service, ensuring women are provided with safe and accessible maternity services.
Our dedicated clinicians and midwives will be working to seamlessly transition the care for each expectant mother to help ensure they have a positive and safe birthing experience.
Find out more about our maternity services.