Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – Nov. 25, 2024 – St. Bernards Healthcare celebrated the opening of Arkansas’s first Maternal Life360 HOME program with a ribbon cutting ceremony in the St. Bernards Medical Center Community Room on Monday.
This program, which is administered by the Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS), allows St. Bernards to partner with Parents as Teachers to support women with high-risk pregnancies, according to a press release from St Bernards Healthcare.
“We are now only seeing 2% of our patients not seeking prenatal care,” said St. Bernards Chief Nursing Officer Emily McGee. “We’re still missing a huge piece of the puzzle. What happens after the baby’s delivered? When we heard about Maternal Life 360 HOME program, we knew that this was something we had to strive to be a part of. Being awarded this funding has allowed us to partner with a wonderful group, Parents as Teachers. Just as we were missing the postpartum piece, they were missing the prenatal piece. We will now be able to offer this service to any Medicaid beneficiary in Craighead County that’s deemed high risk.”
The program’s support services include home-visits during pregnancy and for up to two years after birth. These efforts are aimed at improving health outcomes and health-related social needs like food security and housing, and as a result, the long-term health and well-being of women and babies.
The initiative aims for healthier birth rates, reduced C-section rates, and improved life skills among participants, with a commitment to ongoing support through the first five years of life.
Speakers included McGee, as well as St. Bernards Medical Center Administrator Michael K. Givens and Arkansas Department of Human Services Director of the Division of Medical Services for the Medicaid program Elizabeth Pitman.
Givens said the program is going to change the Northeast Arkansas community as a whole, noting that they serve 23 counties in the across NEA.
“We have many centers of excellence,” he said. “We have a 19-bed neonatology unit that we opened many years ago to serve Northeast Arkansas to insure sure that patients wouldn’t have to travel Little Rock for their healthcare. We’ve just seen women’s and children’s services grow year after year. We feel that as we see what’s going on within the Northeast Arkansas community, and as we see services ending at other facilities, we want to ensure that we step up and we take care of patients within our community and within our region.”
Givens added that the hospital’s mission was to provide Christ-like healing to the community, and he felt the first Maternal Life360 HOME program was one of the key areas where they can provide that mission to all of Northeast Arkansas.
Pitman said that improving maternal health was one of the DHS’s top priorities.
“Gov. Sanders’s Strategic Committee for Maternal Health recently developed a series of recommendations aimed at bettering access to an awareness of care for pregnant women and mothers and babies,” she said. “With this focus, it will lead to a healthier outcome for families, and it has the potential to save lives, and Maternal Life360 HOMEs like the one we’re unveiling today here at St. Bernards play a pivotal role in this approach. Through this initiative, women enrolled in any of our Medicaid programs, like Emily said, who have a high-risk pregnancy will have access to high quality home visiting services, something Medicaid has never been able to offer before.”
For more information about Maternal Life360, click here.
