It Takes a Village: Munson, McLaren and Grand Traverse Women's Clinic fill void left in Petoskey
November 2026
The closure of the main women’s clinic in Petoskey has Munson Healthcare absorbing hundreds of patients across its service area and Traverse City providers traveling north to help fill the gap.
Bay View Obstetrics & Gynecology closed in late August after operating in Petoskey for more than 25 years. It had been acquired in 2023 by Unified Women’s Healthcare, a private equity outfit that cited staffing challenges when it closed Bay View locations in Petoskey and St. Ignace.
Now, the regional medical community is dealing with the fallout in an area already somewhat thin on OB-GYN providers (among many other specialty services) as scores of women were left without care.
“There’s a pretty big ripple effect,” said Dr. Kevin Omilusik, chief medical officer for Munson’s east region.
Absorbing the wave
Munson was able to hire three of Bay View’s doctors, who now are handing hospital calls and clinic duties at Munson-owned facilities in Charlevoix (Charlevoix Hospital) and Gaylord (Otsego Memorial Hospital).
Keeping all three doctors in the region and seeing patients may have kept Bay View’s closure from being a full-blown crisis.
“If we didn’t (hire those doctors), we’d be writing a different story right now,” Omilusik said.
Since the Bay View closure, Munson has gained 218 new obstetrics patients and 389 new gynecology patients, with almost all of them now at Charlevoix or Gaylord. Many were patients of the three docs Munson brought over from Bay View.
“When you're in the middle of getting OB care and you establish that relationship with a physician, most people are probably going to continue that with that physician if they like that doctor,” Omilusik said.
Charlevoix hospital alone is expected to double its birth count this year over last.
Munson plans to hire even more OB-GYN providers and was in the process of doing so even before Bay View closed. This means the system wasn’t caught entirely flat-footed with the flood of new patients.
“Within just a couple of months, we doubled our capacity at Charlevoix through the recruitment of additional nursing staff,” Munson Healthcare Chief Operating Officer Laura Glenn said. “We had to respond pretty rapidly … so that we were ready to care for the women who were choosing to transition their care to us.”
McLaren and GTWC
There’s still a hospital in Petoskey (McLaren Northern Michigan Hospital) with a maternity ward ready to deliver and care for babies, as long as there are providers to make it happen.
Not long after the Bay View closure, McLaren opened its own OB-GYN office in Petoskey (McLaren Northern Michigan Obstetrics and Gynecology). In addition to staffing this new office with two providers, McLaren reached a deal with the Grand Traverse Women’s Clinic in Traverse City to have providers from that office travel north to help out.
GTWC doctors in August began covering OB-GYN calls at the hospital in Petoskey and clinic days at the new McLaren office there. Individual doctors take a three- to four-day day stretch in Petoskey to ensure 24-hour call coverage and clinic hours for that area, GTWC practice manager Tammy Nagy says.
The partnership has been of critical importance for the Petoskey area and will continue until McLaren can hire more providers for its new office.
“We are deeply grateful to Grand Traverse Women’s Clinic, whose partnership was key in allowing us to preserve access to obstetric care in our community,” said Dr. Kenneth Kreuchauf, McLaren Northern Michigan’s chief medical officer. “Their physicians and care teams helped us maintain this essential service, ensuring that patients and families could continue receiving high-quality care close to home.”
Nagy says GTWC’s “partners agreed that this was something we needed to do for the community.”
“It became immediately apparent the impact the closure of Bayview OB-GYN would have on Petoskey, the surrounding area and McLaren hospital. It would create a significant challenge for those patients needing local access to OB-GYN care," she said. “We recognize the importance that this type of care continues to be available to patients in our surrounding communities.”
MadionDr. Tim Madion, administrative physician of GTWC, said his office has spent the last 10 years “building up a deep bench of great physicians and midwives to take care of our community and high-risk patients for the entire region.”
“We understand that it is better for all of us in the region to have high-quality care available at all sites that have maternity units,” he said.
It hasn’t been easy for GTWC.
“In order to staff Petoskey, we had to eliminate a few clinic days here in Traverse City over the next few months, but our manager Tammy and the rest of our clinic team has worked really hard to get patients rescheduled and taken care of,” Madion said. “I will tell you that it has been challenging; my colleagues are stretched thin and working very hard. I’m really proud of all of them.”
Not out of the woods
Munson's Glenn says the OB-GYN provider supply was challenging even before the Bay View closure. As with other professions, there aren’t enough freshly minted doctors and nurses to replace those that are retiring. Beyond that, new docs aren’t always eager to come to rural areas like northern Michigan.
“Especially in our smaller rural communities, (you often see a) cohort of two to three OB-GYNs, which means that they're going to be on call every second or third night,” Glenn said. “We're seeing new graduates of OB-GYN residency programs choose to make their careers in larger programs where there's eight to 10 OB-GYNs and their call burden is less.”
It’s part of a larger trend across all businesses where workers, particularly younger ones, are placing a much higher emphasis on work-life balance.
“There are lifestyle implications,” Glenn said. “When you're on call, you can't go to a kid's sports event that's more than 30 minutes away. You can't have a glass of wine at dinner. There are so many things you can't do when you're on call, and to have that every second or third night really impacts your life.”
Munson hopes its recent plan to consolidate certain facilities will help. It closed its Grayling birthing unit and opened up a newly expanded birthing center at Otsego Memorial Hospital, creating a bigger team in one location.
“We've now built a larger core group of OB-GYNs at Otsego that's easier to recruit to and shares that call burden,” Glenn said. “So part of that combination was really being able to create a sustainable program where we can attract and retain quality OB-GYNs.”
Back in Traverse City, Munson Medical Center’s maternity ward continues to see not only traditional births from the immediate area, but high-risk or complicated pregnancies from across the much larger region. Dr. Julia Riddle of GTWC hopes that Munson Medical Center expands its maternity facilities soon, as the volume of tougher pregnancies continues to grow.
“I don’t remember it being as stressful or as complicated as it is now,” she said. “We’re doing a lot more inductions for people with type 2 diabetes or gestational diabetes or blood pressure issues. Every day we’re taking care of somebody with severe preeclampsia who is on magnesium preterm. Before, you had a baby and left, and now we’re keeping people for several days because of the complexity of their care. Our care is just a lot harder than it used to be.”
Dr. Joe Santanelgo, chief medical officer for all of Munson Healthcare, says the Munson team is “constantly looking at our capacity to care for moms in our region” and has been able to “accommodate every single pregnant mom that enters our facility.”
“While births overall are trending down over the last decade in northern Michigan, we are the only NICU in our region, so those more complex cases are up, which is why we’re investing $40 million right now in a 24-bed (neonatal intensive care unit) and have renovated our OB unit,” he said. "We will continue to monitor space needs when it comes to pregnant moms and babies so we can deliver high quality care for decades to come.”
