Access to contraception can be lifesaving for women, especially in rural areas, where health providers are often limited and under-resourced. A new $431,000 grant to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences will provide contraceptive services, prenatal care and reproductive services to women in 14 rural counties across Arkansas. The anonymous philanthropic donation will be facilitated through the UAMS Institute for Community Health Innovation's mobile units. Kelly Conroy, the Institute's senior director of Community Programs, told Ozarks at Large's Daniel Caruth this program is vital to addressing Arkansas' maternal health crisis.
The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Kelly Conroy: Really kind of increasing availability, awareness and access to all contraceptive methods, helping provide additional education, information, and for women to make a better-informed decision as to preventing unintended pregnancies and making those choices for themselves and their families.
Daniel Caruth: Can you talk a little bit about the landscape of women's healthcare options, especially in these more rural areas? What are the major challenges and difficulties that women are facing there that maybe you don't see in a bigger city or a more populated area?
KC: Yeah, I think there's a lot of different reasons. A lack of providers in those areas who are able to provide the very comprehensive and full options available for contraception. So they may have barriers for many different reasons, but that might include transportation, language, cultural, just a variety of reasons why they have difficulty accessing contraceptive choices.
DC: When we look at contraception, what is the range of care and options that you’re talking about?
KC: So we will provide comprehensive services. We would be able to provide a full women's health exam, and that may include testing. We can do cervical cancer screens, and then we can kind of help them decide on if they're looking for a contraceptive method, what might be best for them and their family. So they might be hormonal, they might be non-hormonal. It might be something that you have to take every day, like a pill, or it could be something like an IUD, which can be kept for five or more years.
DC: We've had a lot of alarming studies come out recently here in the state about maternal health. I think there was one recently this past week that ranked us near the bottom on a scorecard for women's health. There's been studies about our teen birth rate. So, we've known that women's health and health of mothers in our state has been struggling for a long time. Can you walk me through how we got here and how programs like this are maybe helping to make headway?
KC: Access to contraceptive services is essentially a very critical component of public health. So we are providing information for women to make very informed decisions and have that ability to plan and space their pregnancies. Being able to better plan for pregnancies is going to result in healthier outcomes for everyone. The woman is able to be healthier when they become pregnant. They will have healthier babies. And that will also, of course, affect families and their communities if everybody is healthier through that process. So it's really about empowering the women to help make the best decisions for them and their family around contraceptive care.
DC: Can you tell me a little bit about how these services will be rolled out if there's staffing that you guys will need to do in order to make this possible and maybe what the timeline for that looks like?
KC: Yeah. We are hoping to roll out in the month of August here in northwest Arkansas. We already have staff. We have four mobile health units located across the state. Each mobile health unit has a different team that already is providing preventive health services, such as health screenings and vaccinations. Now we're just adding on an additional service that is available to the communities. We have the providers and nurses, and we have community health workers. They all go out as a team. So we are helping them navigate the resources they need to be healthy. If that is local resources on accessing food, insurance or transportation, we have community health workers who will assist with that. So we're really trying to address the holistic needs of the clients that we see. By using our mobile health units, we are really trying to meet our clients where they are, making it very convenient, accessible, and comfortable for them to access these services.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
