A new partnership between the state’s largest hospital system and a nonprofit aims to tackle one of Mississippi’s greatest healthcare challenges — maternal mortality rates.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Mississippi Public Health Institute announced they will work together to improve health outcomes for mothers across the state. Officials aim to make progress through the creation of the Center for Optimizing Maternal Outcomes. Mississippi has a maternal mortality rate of roughly 39.7 deaths per 100,000 live births, ranking No. 49 in the U.S. in that metric.
The Center for Optimizing Maternal Outcomes (COMO), per officials, will serve as a resource for consolidating health care data to better understand the factors contributing to maternal mortality and identify actions health care providers and community partners can take to improve outcomes.
COMO, which is being created in large part courtesy of $1 million in federal funding secured by U.S. Sen Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), is expected to be up and running in September. The center will welcome physicians, researchers, and community leaders to identify needs and deploy resources in 30 counties across southern Mississippi.
The counties include: Adams, Amite, Claiborne, Copiah, Covington, Forrest, Franklin, George, Greene, Hancock, Harrison, Jackson, Jasper, Jefferson, Jefferson Davis, Jones, Lamar, Lawrence, Lincoln, Marion, Pearl River, Perry, Pike, Simpson, Smith, Stone, Walthall, Warren, Wayne, and Wilkinson.
“We will engage with a broad range of interventions, including those further upstream, making sure our population is as healthy as possible going into pregnancy,” Dr. Thomas Dobbs, dean of the John D. Bower School of Population Health at UMMC, said. “We want to make sure that pregnant women are adequately supported, not just medically but across all domains to include mental health and social support.”
Dobbs, Mississippi’s former epidemiologist and state health officer, boasts of his work to address numerous health disparities affecting Mississippians. Through COMO, Dobbs hopes Mississippi can reverse troubling maternal health trends by addressing not only pregnancy-related complications but also the underlying health conditions that can place women at greater risk.
“If we think about the things that are really threatening women’s physical health in pregnancy, most are related to chronic disease, hypertension, and cardiovascular issues. Adding hemorrhage and sepsis, these are the things that we know are leading causes of maternal mortality,” Dobbs said.
Dobbs is one of several UMMC experts contributing to the initiative. Dr. Victoria Gholar, assistant dean for student affairs and assistant professor in the Department of Population Health Science, will also contribute to the project, along with Dr. Paul Byers, Dr. Fazlay Faruque, Dr. Raed Bahelah and Dr. Abigail Gamble, director of research and community engagement at the Myrlie Evers-Williams Institute for the Elimination of Health Disparities.
Gamble said the team is working on the first phase of the project, which includes establishing the infrastructure needed to engage with communities and local leaders and empower them to make data-informed decisions about ways to improve care for women.
The second phase will take that work directly into communities, where the team will meet with local stakeholders to identify evidence-based strategies that address each community’s needs and determine how those strategies can be implemented effectively.
“We have information, we have knowledge, we know what evidence-based practices are and we have supportive policies,” Gamble said. “But again, it’s translating that into something meaningful at the local level, whether that is a local hospital or local community. How do we make these evidence-based practices work for us while preserving the parts that are evidence-based? Mississippi has some of the pieces. We must figure out how we can take those evidence-based approaches and make them work for the local context.”
Officials said COMO will look beyond the walls of hospitals and clinics to address barriers that can affect a woman’s health before, during and after pregnancy. The initiative is expected to support efforts involving transportation, nutrition and postpartum care for expectant and new mothers.
UMMC students and community and faith-based organizations will also play a role in the initiative. Through listening sessions held across the project area, local organizations will have opportunities to share their perspectives on the challenges mothers face and help health care leaders better understand where resources and interventions could have the greatest impact.
The community-centered approach reflects the complexity of Mississippi’s maternal health challenges and the recognition that improving outcomes will require collaboration among health care providers, researchers, policymakers and the communities they serve.