A report out this week from the University of Minnesota tracked the decline of hospital-based obstetric services across the United States over the last decade. The report found that in Arkansas, seven counties have completely lost their obstetric services since 2010. That is in addition to the 40 counties that consistently had no maternity care throughout the study period.
Julia Interrante is the statistical lead at the university’s Rural Health Research Center. She says though access is declining in both urban and rural settings nationwide, rural communities have been hit hardest.
“We have seen between 2010 and 2023, 641 hospitals that lost their obstetric units, and 286 of those were in rural communities. So you can see that rural communities are really overrepresented in places that have lost access to local maternity services.”
Interrante says there are policy solutions that the study found are fairly universal to improving maternal services in rural communities. Often, those include building a baseline of financial support that can bridge the gap between what is needed and what the community can viably support.
"Things like having cost-based reimbursement or having some sort of low-volume payment adjustment or standby payments to help cover those fixed costs, even when the number of births is too low to cover those fixed costs. And other things like having resources and training for emergency obstetrics, because some areas may have lost maternity care services, and it may not be viable for those services to return to those communities.”
In November, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders applied for $1 billion in federal funding for the Rural Health Transformation Program.
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