Baby surge in the Q-C?
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By Deirdre Cox Baker | Monday, January 07, 2008 |
Bunches of births have created a baby boomlet, with Quad-City area hospitals reporting a healthy increase over the year just ended.
Trinity BirthPlace, part of the Trinity Regional Health System, posted a 12 percent increase from 2006 totals with 1,845 babies born during 2007. Genesis Health System hosted 3,131 births, up 3.28 percent.
Trinity and Genesis hospitals with birthing centers are located in Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline and Silvis, Ill.
No trends yet
Although the news about a double-digit increase in births such as Trinity saw is interesting information for demographers, it is too early to predict any overall trends, said Ellen Milliron, a senior planner with the Bi-State Regional Commission in Rock Island.
“As far as real population growth goes, you just can’t use these numbers to show trends either up or down,” she said. “Most probably, the numbers just involve the hospitals.”
Census data on babies is tracked two different ways, she said. One method counts them as additional residents of the county in which they are born. The other method counts babies according to the place where their parents reside.
Births at Trinity and Genesis hospitals include residents from other communities in the region who drive to the Quad-Cities to have their children. Likewise, those residents could go to a hospital closer to home and outside the metro area — including those in Clinton, Muscatine, Iowa City in Iowa and Geneseo, Galesburg and Sterling in Illinois — to give birth.
Population up slightly
There have been more than 3,000 babies born in the Genesis hospitals each of the past eight years, officials there said. Trinity has now seen the number of births at its facilities top 1,800 for the first time.
The Trinity at Terrace Park campus in Bettendorf, which opened in 2004, is the big reason for the increase, said Jane Wiggins, Trinity’s director of women’s services. There were 364 deliveries at the Bettendorf facility during 2006, up 574 percent from the 54 births averaged at its former Davenport facility along Kimberly Road before Terrace Park was built.
The latest available U.S. Census figures are from 2006. They show that there are 162,621 residents of Scott County and 147,545 of Rock Island County for a total of 310,166 people living in the immediate metro area. That is up slightly, but it is less than a 1 percent increase from the 308,042 people counted in 2000.
Popular names
Elementary school teachers in the Quad-City area should expect their alphabetical-order list to be top-heavy in a few years with students whose names begin with the letter A.
Ava for girls and Aiden for boys were the most popular first names for babies born last year within the Genesis Health System. As for Trinity Regional Health System, the most common monikers were Alexander for boys and Jaydon for girls.
Deirdre Cox Baker can be contacted at (563) 383-2492 or dbaker@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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