Robert and Tonya Jones at The Ottawa Hospital, in Ottawa. (CBC)

A woman who is one of 11 in the past month to have been sent out of Newfoundland and Labrador for medical care because the province's hospitals couldn't handle her high-risk pregnancy says her experience was horrible.

Tonya Jones, 37, of Grand Falls-Windsor, is now at the Ottawa Hospital preparing for the birth of her first child.

Hospitals in St. John's don't have enough equipment or staff to accept any more children who need to be on a ventilator so they have been sending pregnant women whose babies are likely to need such equipment when they are born outside the province.

In the last 13 months, 18 women with high-risk pregnancies – and two newborns – have been sent out of Newfoundland to other parts of the country for care. Eleven of those cases have occurred just in the past month as the staffing shortage has intensified because of summer holidays.

Jones said her own ordeal began six months into her pregnancy.

"I started bleeding overnight, and everything happened pretty quickly," she said.

Jones was having contractions, and doctors said her baby might need special care if she gave birth early — care they said couldn't be provided in Newfoundland.

5-hour flight to Ottawa 'really scary'

"They didn't have any more ventilators available there at the Janeway [Children's Health and Rehabilitation Centre] in St. John's," Jones said. "So, they said it would best for us to be flown here. This was the closest site that would have a ventilator."

'I hope nobody else has to go through this.'— Tonya Jones

Within hours, Jones and her husband, Robert, were on a plane to Ontario with Jones hemorrhaging on a stretcher.

"It was really scary," said Jones. "It took about almost five hours — the flight did. And the last half hour was ah, I don't know, I didn't know I was going to get through it."

She was eventually stabilized. Today, 27 weeks into her pregnancy, her unborn child weighs two pounds and nine ounces.

Jones said the care she is receiving in Ottawa is exceptional but she still wishes she could have stayed in her home province.

"I hope nobody else has to go through this," she said. "I really do. I hope nobody — nobody's got to leave their families and friends behind, to go far away to a place where you don't know anybody."

Invest in equipment rather than airfare: MD

A doctor who specializes in caring for newborns agrees pregnant women and their newborns shouldn't have to fly around the country for care.

Dr. Shoo Lee, of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and the founding director of the Canadian Neonatal Network, said flying women with high-risk pregnancies out of Newfoundland and Labrador could be risky for them and their children.

"When you impose additional mental stress and financial and other burdens on the family and on the patient herself, it can actually worsen her condition," Lee said.

"We all know that when we are depressed or upset, we are not in a good frame of mind, but it also affects our physical health."

Lee says fixing the shortage of resources to deal with high-risk pregnancies makes economic sense.

He said Ontario and British Columbia have both stopped sending women with high-risk pregnancies out of their home province.

He said that in both cases, the cost of paying for more equipment and staff was less than flying patients to another location.