Maternal, prenatal care lacking

The fact that dismal public health statistics for Georgia and Alabama are familiar doesn’t make them any less dismal. On the contrary, it makes them — or ought to make them — that much more disheartening.

The latest in this familiar litany of bad news is a just-released report, summarized this week in Georgia Health News, putting Georgia in the bottom 10 nationally in the infant and maternal health categories of premature births, low birthweight babies and infant mortality.

The Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Georgia’s 2016 report on maternal and infant health offered, along with the usual grim data, some potentially useful details.

For instance, Georgia is especially lax in tracking how much (if any) prenatal care is provided, and what kinds; nor does the state track either the mother or the baby for health indicators after birth.

“We have the highest rate of missing prenatal care data in the nation,” the nonprofit coalition’s executive director Elise Blasingame told GHN, “and do not report on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders beyond postpartum depression.”

Both matter profoundly, of course: According to Georgia Health News, babies born after no prenatal care are three times more prone to low birth weight, and five times likely to become infant mortality statistics.

Clearly, more public health focus on prenatal care could reduce some of those troubling trends.

Another interesting find: Georgia’s miscarriage and infant mortality rates dipped noticeably in 2010, corresponding to a “significant rise” (GHN) that year in pregnant women getting flu shots.

Unfortunately, while about half of the pregnant women in the U.S. now get flu shots, that figure in Georgia is only 17 percent. Part of that prenatal care tracking the state needs to improve should involve better access to flu vaccine and other maternal care.

Access, of course, is a big part of the problem right from the start. As has been detailed in these pages before, rural health care is at crisis levels in many parts of the state, southwest and north Georgia in particular, and that crisis obviously includes maternal and prenatal care.

GHN reports that there are only about 75 hospitals in Georgia with birthing units, and those are concentrated in just 46 of Georgia’s 159 counties. Access to medical care matters not just when a woman is in labor, but throughout the pregnancy and through the early stages of motherhood as well.

Georgia has begun to address the problem in several ways. A program of tax credits for funding of rural hospitals is one legislative remedy; another is a bill providing for better access to clinical lactation care.

The Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition also recommends another reform that has been proposed before, but is especially critical in this area — higher Medicaid reimbursement rates for physicians who serve at-risk patients.

This is not a problem that shows signs of abating on its own any time soon: Georgia’s unintended pregnancy rate, the magazine reports, now stands at 60 percent.

This story was originally published October 20, 2016 at 3:58 PM with the headline "Maternal, prenatal care lacking."