Mississippi loses roughly 350 babies a year before their first birthday. According to State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney, about 65% of those deaths are preventable, and saving just 150 of them would bring the state below the national infant mortality average.
That number frames a new episode of The Obstetrics Podcast, in which Dr. Edney and OBHG Market Medical Director Dr. Norman Connell discuss what it will take to close the access gaps driving the state’s maternal and infant health outcomes.
Forty-two of Mississippi’s 82 counties lack an obstetrician or a birthing hospital, but Dr. Edney pushes back on calling all of them deserts. The state defines a maternal health desert as any area more than 40 minutes from obstetric care, and some of those counties are close enough to neighboring facilities that patients can still reach them. For communities that genuinely can’t sustain a full-time OB, the state is deploying telehealth, mobile clinics, and health department outreach to reach high-risk mothers in the first trimester.
Where a birthing hospital exists but is losing providers, OBHG’s Maternal Health Access Solutions (MHAS) offers a different approach that can also extend the careers of clinicians approaching burnout rather than simply replacing them.
Both physicians stress that the state’s hospitals and clinicians are strong. The weakness is the system connecting patients to them. Dr. Edney draws a parallel to education, where Mississippi climbed from last in the nation to the top 10 over the past decade.
“If we did it in education,” he said, “we can do it in health.”
Dr. Connell puts it more bluntly: “I want to be number one.”
Download the full episode of The Obstetrics Podcast.