One of the region’s largest hospitals has unveiled a new multi-million dollar maternity ward.

The Cayuga BirthPlace at Cayuga Medical Center will have six labor and delivery rooms, along with a dozen post-partum rooms and a new C-Section Surgical Operating room.

Terri MacCheyne, director of maternal child health at Cayuga Medical Center, said before this new center, doctors would have to wait for an operating team and transport patients if a C-section was needed.

“If we decide we have to do a C-section now, we don’t have to wait for anybody,” MacCheyne said. “We get that baby out when we need to for either the mom’s or the baby’s health.”

Before this new center opened, she says families weren’t involved in the birth experience.

“Dads and partners wen’re involved at all…which I always thought was just so wrong,” she said.

Now, MacCheyne says, the hospital provides family areas that allow the partner to be more involved.

The maternity ward will open in early July.