HJAR Mar/Apr 2024

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS I  MAR / APR 2024 19 As chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, service line director for women's health at UAMS, and member of Arkansas' Maternal Mortality Review Committee, what is the current state of maternal and infant health in Arkansas? I can speak more closely to maternal health as I don't really follow the infants that much. Maternal health has been talked about a lot recently and very similarly to the reasons that we talk about infant health — it is a problem, and we've now been able to quantify the problem. In Arkansas, a largely rural state, we know there are higher levels of things like hypertension, diabetes, and obe- sity that lead to lots of chronic diseases. We can quantify health measures such as that. Nirvana Manning, MD Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Service Line Director for Women’s Health University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Nirvana Manning, MD, graduated from the College of Medicine at UAMS where she also completed residency in obstetrics and gynecology. She is an elected member of the Arkansas Medical Society Board of Trustees and an inaugural member of the Arkansas Maternal Mortality Review Committee appointed by the Governor. She is a member of the American College of Obstetrics andGynecology, Council of University Chairs in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and North American Menopause Society. With the Arkansas Maternal Mortality Review Committee, we have now been able to quantify mater- nal deaths in a way that we never really could before. It's very similar to how I think they look at infant mortality. It’s a statistic that we can now [use to] com- pare ourselves to other parts of this country and even other countries. I think it's a repre- sentation of the overall health in our state. It's not shocking that maternal health andmater- nal mortality, as well as maternal morbidity, are so high when the overall health of our state is also pretty poor and lacking in certain areas, such as the things I just mentioned.The Arkansas Maternal Mortality Review Com- mittee is a group of peers from all aspects of maternal healthcare. We have myself as an OB-GYN, a maternal fetal medicine doctor, anesthesia, cardiology, social work, nurse midwives, nursing leaders, you name it — if they cross the path of a mom or a woman in healthcare, we have, hopefully, a representa- tion on that committee. We look through every maternal death. When those first few years of statistics came out, we saw things like 91%, andmost recently 92%, of maternal deaths being preventable. As a background to that, as a committee, we hope things like suicide and homicide are potentially preventable if we have systems in place to help these women. It's not just med- ical care, this one piece that happens at the hospital, that we're looking at as far as pre- ventability — it's overall care, the systems in place, the community. Do they have support?