A 2022 report from the March of Dimes shows that nearly half of the counties in Arkansas qualify as maternity care deserts. That term is defined as a county lacking access to birthing hospitals, birth centers and obstetric clinicians like OB-GYNs or midwives. The report finds that 60% of maternity care deserts in the country are in rural counties. Ozarks at Large’s Aiden Dixon reports.
Dr. William Greenfield has spent years working with mothers in Arkansas as a professor of OB-GYN at UAMS and a medical director for family health at the Arkansas Department of Health. He says the challenge facing rural mothers starts with two basic issues.
“In Arkansas, we’re talking around 35,000 births per year. And when you look within our state, in terms of where the concentration of providers are, when you get to the rural areas of the state, you can certainly see there are large swaths of the state that may not necessarily have providers who are able to provide delivery services. So one of the challenges that our patients are going to face is simply access to providers, because there’s a relatively low number in certain portions of the state. That’s one challenge. A second challenge that we would face is the number of delivering hospitals. That number has diminished over the past several years, and that creates a barrier as well.”…