University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center

During this webinar, leadership of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center Maternity Care Team will provide a timely update on critical issues impacting maternal health in rural U.S. communities. The presentation will describe disparities in maternal health outcomes for rural populations, the growing scarcity of obstetric care, and the far-reaching consequences of obstetric unit closures. Additionally, the presentation will delve into the reasons behind these closures and examine policy solutions aimed at improving access to maternal health care and advancing health equity. Register: https://ow.ly/xLEK50TTAue #ruralhealth

🚨Rural Health Research Alert🚨 "States and Rural Communities With and Without the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE)" The purpose of this policy brief is to measure sociodemographic differences in areas with and without a Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) organization headquarters among rural communities and by state-level PACE availability and headquarters location. Key Findings: • States with PACE have smaller shares of rural residents than states without PACE (23% vs. 39%). • States with rural-headquartered PACE organizations have four times the median proportion of residents who identify as non-Hispanic Black compared with states without any PACE organizations (11% vs. 3%). • Rural communities with a PACE headquarters differ from rural communities without a PACE headquarters along sociodemographic lines, including having more residents who identify as Hispanic (4% vs. 2%) or non-Hispanic and a race other than white alone (13% vs. 9%), higher educational attainment (58% vs. 50%), higher unemployment (4% vs. 2%), greater geographic mobility (13% vs. 7%), more residents without private transportation to work (5% vs. 1%), shorter travel time to work (73% vs. 64%), more occupied housing units (88% vs. 81%), and lower rates of home ownership (67% vs. 80%). View and subscribe: https://ow.ly/fx9650Tvp0l University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center #ruralhealth

Our University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center maternity care team just published the latest data on hospital-based obstetric service loss, updating our prior work on closures with data from 2010-2022. A couple of high-level findings: • The trend of rural closures from the prior decade continued. By 2022, close to 60% of rural counties had no hospital-based obstetric services. • While rare, we found a number of rural counties actually gained hospital-based obstetric services. • Rural noncore counties continue to be much less likely to have – and more likely to lose – hospital-based obstetric services than rural micropolitan counties. Katy Backes Kozhimannil Julia D. Interrante, PhD, MPH Alyssa Fritz Emily Sheffield Check out the infographic (stay tuned for more detailed research to come!) and subscribe to rural health research alerts here: https://lnkd.in/gFXYms5c