Prenatal care gets boost
Published 12:01 am Friday, September 9, 2011
It’s heartening news that the Community Health Center of Snohomish County is hiring more doctors to provide prenatal care to women without health insurance or those on Medicaid.
With the addition of five physicians, with plans for a sixth, the nonprofit organization, which has been providing services in the area for more than 25 years, can help up to 300 women get prenatal care this year at its clinics in south Everett and on Broadway, The Herald’s Sharon Salyer reported Tuesday.
The announcement comes on the heels of a study that ranks the newborn mortality rate in the United States 41st in the world, the worst of any industrial nation. Newborns in countries including Malaysia, Cuba, and Poland now have a better chance of survival than those born in the U.S., the Associated Press reorted.
“The United States has more neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but its newborn (death) rate is higher than any of those countries,” said the annual State of the World’s Mothers report.
The article, a collaboration between the World Health Organization, and Save the Children, notes: “It’s not that things are worse in the United States than before, it’s that the U.S. isn’t making progress like other countries.”
In some cases, however, “things” are worse — specifically access to care. In Snohomish County, the number of clinics providing prenatal care and delivery services has sharply declined, in part due to liability issues, Salyer reported. One of those was the Community Health Center, which stopped providing baby delivery services in 2004 due to problems with malpractice insurance. Many clinics have also limited the number of Medicaid patients they see because the federal-state health care program pays only a portion of the costs of caring for patients.
The Snohomish Health District has called the county’s shortage of prenatal and delivery services a medical crisis.
Between 2007 and 2009, an estimated 26 percent of women in Snohomish County received no prenatal care during the first trimester of their pregnancy. About 1.2 percent of women receive no prenatal services at all, Salyer reported. That means over the three-year period, 299 Snohomish County women had no prenatal care, said Dr. Gary Goldbaum, health officer for the Snohomish Health District.
Women who don’t receive prenatal care are at higher risk for medical problems — for themselves and their babies. The three leading causes of newborn death are all avoidable: preterm delivery, asphyxia and infection.
Community Health Center’s re-entry into this most vital medical realm is a true commitment and investment, one direly needed.
