Another Glimmer of Hope For Pregnant Women
Posted by Advocate Aaron on June 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Remember the huge March of Dimes Report Card that shed light on the pervasive premature birth problem in the United States? You know, the one that put in indisputable figures the dismal state of our maternity health care system… the one that found that one of the leading factors in the U.S. premature birth rate is a lack of prenatal care?
While legislators finally begin addressing the overwhelming need for proper and affordable prenatal care, some institutions have been offering affordable prenatal care to pregnant women for years. And the results are just as stunning as the figures in the March of Dimes report.
Take Dallas’ Parkland Memorial Hospital, which last week announced that it had cut premature rates almost by half in the last two decades (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-babies_28met.ART0.State.Edition1.4a5c74e.html).
The information published by Parkland validates the assertion that prenatal care is vital to healthy, timely delivery. Two paragraphs say it all:
“Dallas County’s public hospital, which operates one of the nation’s busiest maternity wards, cut its rate of premature births nearly in half – to 4.9 percent in 2006 from 9.4 percent of births in 1988.
Parkland officials credited comprehensive prenatal care for improving the outcomes of 16,000 births annually at the hospital, which has the second-highest number of deliveries in any U.S. hospital.”
The statistics are amazing, especially for a high-volume hospital such as Parkland. And to what does Parkland owe its stellar premature birth rate record? PRENATAL CARE!
What’s more, Parkland officials say most of their maternity patients are low-income women who either pay affordable $50 co-payments per visit or qualify for government assistance and pay little to nothing at all.
With these figures, it’s no surprise that Parkland is ranked among the nation’s best gynecological hospitals (http://www.usnews.com/listings/hospitals/6740950). And because Parkland is a PUBLIC HOSPITAL, the hospital’s success in reducing instances of premature births lends credence to the notion that publicly-funded medicine can and does work!
Let’s hope that the news doesn’t fall on deaf ears, that Congress learns from the successes of others and works to provide proper prenatal care to all women, regardless of socioeconomic factors, so America’s future is invested in healthy children.
