Healthy Babies, Healthy Mothers: YKHC and Southcentral Foundation provide spectrum of pregnancy care.

AuthorMottl, Judy
PositionHEALTHCARE - Medical condition overview

Alaskas vast geography is a wonder to behold for both residents and tourists, but it presents more than a few challenges for women when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth--scenarios which already are inherent with worries and concerns for moms-to-be.

For example, just the monthly checkup can present a financial and logistical hurdle if a patient isn't living within driving range of a medical center or healthcare clinic. The trip to a healthcare provider can involve taking a boat or a plane, or both, and then a car ride, and may even entail an overnight stay due to transportation time. And, as with most deliveries in Alaska's remote and rural areas, weather plays a big element in transport options and transport availability.

That's because weather, just like a pregnancy, is often unpredictable, explains Janet Froeschle, a certified midwife at Southcentral Foundation, which provides healthcare for residents in the South central region of Alaska. The coverage area includes Anchorage and surrounding villages extending to the Iliamna Lake Region, McGrath, Pribilof Islands, and the Aleutian Chain. Pregnant women in these areas usually deliver at the Alaska Native Medical Center, the referral hospital for the entire state for women with complicated or high-risk pregnancies. These women also come to Anchorage to receive care and deliver their babies.

"Even with close follow up and monitoring, pregnancy is not always predictable, and neither is the weather in rural Alaska, especially in the winter. It can take hours for a medevac plane to reach a village," Froeschle says, noting weather can prevent flights which then makes boats the best, and sometimes lone, means of transportation to get patients to larger airports.

Prenatal Care Is a Team Effort

Such unpredictability in transport means the community health clinic and staff play a critical role in providing prenatal and pregnancy care--as does communication between regional hospital doctors and rural medical staff.

"Prenatal care for rural women is a team effort," says South central Foundation physician Dr. Donna Galbreath. "It starts with the remarkable health aides in the rural communities working in those clinics. Some of the larger clinics are also staffed with nurse practitioners or physician assistants. These providers are vital; they are part of the communities and key to getting women in to initiate prenatal care."

Southcentral Foundation's OB-GYN department is home to the provider's Rural Maternal Child Health Program (RMCH), which includes a...

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