MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Access to maternal and child healthcare is a barrier to many families in the Mid-South but the disparities disproportionately impact Black families.
A new community health assessment from Baptist Memorial Healthcare shows in Tennessee and Mississippi, nearly one in five black babies is born premature or with a lower birth weight compared to one in 10 white babies.
The assessment also revealed a staggering number of Mid-South women don’t get the care they and their babies need before and after birth.
“It’s a problem that has been going on for a while, and it is not easy to fix,” Dr. Riad Homsi, an OBGYN in Memphis, said. “I have patients that are not able to get to my office because they don’t have a way to get here, and the same thing applies going to the hospital.”
Dr. Homsi said that if an expectant mother doesn’t get the care she needs it can result in a number of negative outcomes, including premature birth, low birth weight and maternal and infant mortality.
“You don’t want to see somebody who’s coming in at 36 weeks already diabetic, hypertension and no care. You need to take care of those as early as possible to decrease the risk of complications later on in the pregnancy,” Dr. Homsi said.
According to the community health assessment, there were more than 1,600 infant deaths in Mississippi and nearly 2,900 in Tennessee from 2015-19.
In both states, the infant mortality rate for Black babies was nearly twice as much than for white infants.
Similar disparities are seen in the maternal death rate.
From 2017 to 2019 in Tennessee, black women were 1.5 times more likely to die during or within a year of pregnancy as white people.
“The disparities are related to how people are living, how they get access to healthcare, are they scared of getting to healthcare, some kind of barriers we are not able to find out,” Dr. Homsi said.
Dr. Keith Norman with Baptist healthcare said that they are working on ways to fill those gaps.
He said that one way is to bring back classes where men and women can participate together in the birth process.
“We realize that when a father is part of a child’s life from the start and support for that mother carrying the baby, there’s a better opportunity for her to go full term and deliver a healthy child,” Norman said.
Officials with Baptist said that a community health assessment is put together every three years to help track community health and to better respond to the needs.
Read the full report here: baptistonline.org/about/chna.
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