Rutland Regional Medical Center. File photo by Mike Dougherty/VTDigger Rutland Regional Medical Center has voluntarily withdrawn its request to close five pediatric inpatient beds following a bruising public hearing and over 150 public comments in opposition to the decision. The hospital says it still intends to pursue a redesign of its pediatric services, but it will work directly with the Vermont Agency of Human Services to continue this transformation work rather than going through the state’s main healthcare regulator, the Green Mountain Care Board. Last Friday, the care board held the first hearing of its kind to evaluate the potential closure. During that meeting, regulators interrogated the hospital’s confusing financial reports, whether its administrators had assessed the true cost of the closure to families and the state’s healthcare system and if it had considered alternatives — like having fewer beds or more adaptable ones. Rutland’s desire to close the inpatient beds is part of a broader challenge rural hospitals across the state are facing as they struggle to balance low patient volume while maintaining care quality and still balancing their budgets. In Friday’s hearing, care board member David Murman distilled the issue to a question.  “How do we as a rural state balance access to essential services that are needed in communities with the reality that some of these services are fairly low volume, and we have very few options for admitting pediatrics in Vermont?” he asked. The hospital is not alone in this push to close pediatric services. Thursday’s news comes the same week as a high-profile paper landed in the journal Pediatrics finding a much broader trend of hospitals around the country drastically reducing their pediatric inpatient services over the last 20 years. The authors found that hospitals providing no pediatric care beyond the emergency department more than doubled.  If the Rutland hospital had closed its pediatric inpatient beds, most of the region’s children would have needed to receive care through extended stays in the emergency department or through a transfer to a larger, academic hospital, like University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, about two hours away. The potential pediatric bed closure has served as a kind of trial run for the Green Mountain Care Board’s newly granted ability to block hospital service cuts, under Vermont’s Act 68, which was signed into law this year. The hospital’s withdrawal of its request came before the care board could vote on the potential closure. Correction: A previous version of this story mischaracterized the drive time between Rutland Regional Medical Center and University of Vermont Medical Center. This story will be updated. Read the story on VTDigger here: Rutland Regional Medical Center withdraws request to close pediatric beds. ...read more read less