Every month a baby boom for Jacksonville

A birth rate among the highest in the nation is business as usual for local hospitals, officials said this week.

Officials with the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital said the hospital delivered 191 babies in October, 183 in November and 190 in December, averaging roughly six per day for each month. Onslow Memorial Hospital delivered 486 babies in the last three months of the year: 135 deliveries in October, 167 in November and 184 in December.

At year’s end, Bloomberg reported that census data showed Jacksonville leading U.S. metropolitan regions in births, with 104 per 1,000 women between 15 and 50 years old in the last 12 months.

This busy final quarter followed a record-setting baby boom in September, with OMH delivering 216 babies and the Naval Hospital 203. Since then, monthly averages have decreased slightly, but even normal birth rates for Jacksonville make headlines in the rest of the country.

Lots of babies is a natural result of an extremely youthful population, Naval Hospital Cmdr. Elizabeth French, department head for Maternal Child Inpatient Nursing Unit, told The Daily News, and the large military population only increases that factor.

“We always say, Marines are good at making babies and blowing stuff up,” she said.

Deliveries did increase measurably two years ago, when President George W. Bush’s Grow the Force policy brought an additional 15,000 troops and family members to the area, French said. But numbers are now holding a steady average of 175-180 births per month from year to year.

Navy Lt. Mather Bennett, an OB/GYN with the hospital, said there was a five-birth increase between October 2009 and October 2010 — a difference that is barely statistically significant.

“It’s more of a perceived increase,” he said. “It’s not because there’s a boom, necessarily.”

While French said her nurses joke about highway signs welcoming deployed troops home signaling a nine-month countdown to a host of new babies, hospital officials don’t really know what triggers the occasional spike in delivery numbers.

But, she said, the hospital is prepared for everything, with 10 labor rooms, five triage rooms, and the ability to surge with rooms down the hall if another month brings a high baby count.

At Onslow Memorial, spokesman Tim Strickland said numbers can fluctuate wildly from month to month. After September’s record-setting high, births dipped to 135 in October. In December, the hospital delivered 184 babies, and slightly lower numbers are projected for January and February.

At both hospitals, department heads submit information about the number of women expected to give birth at that location up to two months in advance, so that medical personnel can adequately prepare. These estimates run high, due to miscarriages and other unforeseen circumstances. Onslow Memorial projected 250 deliveries going into September, but recorded only 216.

But while officials receive birth estimates with enough time to prepare for high-volume months, it’s impossible to tell more than a few months out when another mini baby boom might take place, Strickland said.

“We really don’t know,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to research that particular subject.”

Strickland said the hospital was now fully prepared for new population numbers due to Grow the Force, and September, still the record for baby deliveries, had proved a useful test of capabilities.

The hospital had to order additional supplies, rent extra fetal monitors, dedicate its entire second floor to maternity services and increase linens and other medical supplies by 20 percent before the month began.

“That month when we had our record really helped us to accommodate a higher number,” he said. “Now that we’ve been through that exercise, we are very confident that we could accommodate another surge like that with no difficulty.”