Sense of Community
Care across distance: maternal health in rural settings
Clip | 2m 25sVideo has Closed Captions
Hear about the challenges faced by mom’s in rural areas
The Birth Place at Citizens Memorial Hospital in Bolivar serves eight rural counties. Hear about the challenges faced by mom’s in rural areas, and how they work to make sure everyone has a chance for care and support.
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Sense of Community is a local public television program presented by OPT
Sense of Community
Care across distance: maternal health in rural settings
Clip | 2m 25sVideo has Closed Captions
The Birth Place at Citizens Memorial Hospital in Bolivar serves eight rural counties. Hear about the challenges faced by mom’s in rural areas, and how they work to make sure everyone has a chance for care and support.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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People need to understand that access to care is not the same for every person.
If you live in a city that has a hospital that's delivering babies, then you're very fortunate.
In the state of Missouri, we have many counties.
Over half of our counties do not have a delivering hospital.
With the closure of additional real hospitals as well as OB units, we know it's getting harder and harder, and people have to drive long distances to care.
I have several patients who drive one to two hours to come see me for each prenatal visit.
Our surrounding communities don't have hospitals that include labor and delivery.
It's called a maternity health desert, where we just don't have OB/GYNs or hospitals that offer those services.
And if you live outside of Greene County, unfortunately you're going to have to make your way into Greene County to receive those cares.
We have all those resources and access needed to keep patients and their babies safe.
I think you have to get that connection and that support within your community.
Doesn't really help to have a team of people that like you that live an hour and a half away.
Really, what we need to do is we need to partner with local services-- so local health care workers, community health workers, social workers.
And we can do so many things by telehealth now.
And we have technology.
And so it's really just figuring out how can we provide that care virtually or from a distance and still offer them support?
There is a lack of resources available within our counties.
That creates concern for our pregnant women.
Usually, that comes with transportation.
So with our women coming from eight counties, getting to their appointments is very hard.
Coming to one place to get all your resources is definitely ideal for somebody that doesn't have transportation, specifically in a rural area, because if they're from a different county, they're going to get maternity care here, but then they're going to have to go to the other county to get their WIC benefits, or food stamps or food pantry, whatever that is.
It could be multiple stops.
So providing it all in one stop is definitely ideal.
We want all moms to get the care that they need and them to have a healthy pregnancy.
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Care across distance: maternal health in rural settings
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