BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBRC) – The University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing (UAB) is taking health care on the road with its new Moms and Kids Mobile Health Clinic.
The traveling care team operates from an RV and offers prenatal, pregnancy, postpartum, infant, and pediatric services in rural communities.
Michele Talley, a professor and associate dean for clinical and global partnerships at the UAB School of Nursing, leads the initiative.
“Providing access to care improves health outcomes. We know that healthy moms have healthy babies, and those healthy babies grow up to be healthy adults,” Talley said.
An analysis by the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) estimates that almost 90% of women living in rural counties drive at least 30 minutes to get to a birthing hospital. Access to prenatal care is often near those hospitals, and distance to care is a contributing reason that a quarter of women in Alabama had inadequate prenatal care in 2019, according to state research.
The Moms and Kids Mobile Health Clinic will eliminate the transportation barrier by meeting patients in their communities.
“We know a lot of women do not get and receive prenatal care,” Talley said. “And so our mobile health unit is hoping, with other partners there, to go into those counties to provide those services so that we can provide the care and in the long term we can start to see an improvement in our maternal mortality and morbidity and then reduce premature births as well as infant mortality.”
The RV was funded by a grant through the university’s Strategic Investment Fund, and one of the key goals of this initiative is to build a sustainable model to keep the mobile unit running for years to come.
“We are now billing for Medicaid services, which is part of the sustainability plan that goes beyond the grant funding period,” said Maria Shirey, dean of the UAB School of Nursing.
The mobile unit care team includes a pediatric nurse practitioner, nurse, and nurse informatician to help with health record management and referrals to physicians.
There will also be a certified nurse midwife and a social worker.
“We have historically found with the care of women and children that there is a need for social and emotional support. And by virtue of that, we have social workers as part of our team and in addition to that, we’re going to be adding a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner to that team,” Shirey said. She continued, “We are in a position to provide holistic care that addresses the needs of mothers and children, both physically and emotionally.”
For the past year, and before the RV was ready to deploy, the nursing team has been working in Head Start Programs in Marengo, Wilcox, and Choctaw counties and have treated more than 120 patients.
“Patients have welcomed the services that we are providing. The moms have said that they have thanked us for bringing that care a little closer to them, stating that they were having to drive 45 minutes to an hour to get care and that they were having to wait for months to get this done,” Talley said.
This mobile unit is another way UAB’s women and children’s health initiative is working to meet health care needs in Alabama through teaching, research, and collaborative practice.
“We need to be reminded that our children are our future, and we have to invest in them now and this is just a small part of that that we are continuing to really work on,” Shirey said.
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