The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) has been awarded $1.2 million in federal funds over five years to help establish a Perinatal Quality Collaborative (PQC) to improve the quality of care for mothers and babies throughout Arkansas.
Working with the Arkansas Department of Health, the collaborative’s plan is to improve maternal and infant health outcomes by identifying health care processes that need to be improved and that use the best available methods to make changes as quickly as possible.
“Our goal will be to engage all birthing hospitals in Arkansas,” said Jennifer Callaghan-Koru, Ph.D., associate professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Internal Medicine.
The funds came in the form of a grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Division of Reproductive Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Altogether, the CDC distributed $8.2 million to help 27 statewide collaboratives, including the one under development in Arkansas, as well as the national network that supports them.
Meanwhile, Arkansas recently was accepted into the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM), a national quality improvement initiative that supports best practices to make births safer, improve maternal health outcomes such as mortality and postpartum infection and save lives. The state had to make commitments to implement maternal safety bundles in order to enroll in the alliance. A safety bundle is a structured way of improving care processes to attain desired outcomes. AIM states also contribute to a national data center that tracks progress in reaching improvement goals.
The collaborative will build on existing perinatal quality improvement work led by the Perinatal Outcomes Workgroup Through Education Research (POWER) team at UAMS, a part of the High-Risk Pregnancy Program.
“The POWER team looks forward to working with the AIM program as we transition into a fully function PQC,” said Dawn Brown, clinical program director for POWER. “This will only enhance what we have been doing and provide support as we work to move the needle in the right direction when it comes to maternal and neonatal outcomes across our state.”
Wanda Barfield, director of the CDC Division of Reproductive Health, said the grants more than doubled the amount of CDC funding provided to the network of collaboratives.
“This significant expansion of CDC support for PQCs builds capacity to improve the quality of perinatal care for mothers and babies in their states,” Barfield added. “The CDC is committed to addressing health disparities and improving outcomes for every mother and child.”
The collaboratives focus on improving key maternal health outcomes, such as reducing preterm births, reducing severe pregnancy complications associated with high blood pressure and hemorrhage, reducing racial/ethnic and geographic disparities, reducing cesarean births among low-risk pregnant women and improving screening and treatment for mothers with substance abuse disorder and newborns with neonatal abstinence syndrome.
Arkansas ranks as one of the worst states in America for maternal health. In the CDC’s 2018 comparison of 26 states with available data, Arkansas had the highest maternal mortality ratio.
Multiple factors contribute to Arkansas’ poor maternal health outcomes, including relatively high rates of poverty and large rural areas with limited obstetric care.
The content of this news release on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services award number NU58DP007253-01-11 is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the HHS.
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