Although KUMC professor Karen Weis never dreamed that she would be doing maternity care, that all changed after she was commissioned into the Air Force the day after graduating nursing school.
She grew passionate about maternal care from leading birthing centers and maternity care units within the Department of Defense, which delivers more babies than any other health system in the United States. Seeing how maternal health care differed around the world, Weis was inspired to fix issues of access to care in Kansas.
Being deployed in locations such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, she said that it was a perfect transition into the research she does now in access to obstetrics care.
“The one element that people don’t maybe realize is that when you’re in the military, you’re always preparing to have to potentially go to austere locations and provide care in austere locations,” Weis said. “I was deployed five times to some very austere locations, and you learn how to think outside the box and be innovative, and I think that I bring that to this issue.”
Born in Salina, and raised on a farm, Weis noticed how rural communities in particular struggle with access to maternal care as opposed to more metropolitan areas.
“I recognize this is a big issue. And really the one thing that a lot of people aren’t even talking about, is the idea that when counties or areas don’t have the health care that people expect or need, they leave,” Weis said. “If young individuals of reproductive age perceive that the care that they are going to need isn’t available, they’re going to leave rural communities.”
The U.S. has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality among the world’s advanced nations. Despite most pregnancy-related deaths being preventable with appropriate care, rural communities are in crisis with most no longer providing maternity care at all.
With Kansas being a rural state, access to obstetrical care remains a critical issue with 59% of rural hospitals not offering OB services according to data from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. This leaves women in rural communities vulnerable as they must travel to different communities to receive care.
To help combat this issue, the Health and Resources Service Administration (HRSA) has awarded the University of Kansas Medical Center a four-year, nearly $4 million grant to improve pregnancy and birth outcomes in rural Kansas in which Weis serves as the principal investigator.
“I’ve been in locations around the world where maternal health care is abhorred,” Weis said. “And now, of course, working where Kansas is second only to Texas for having the most rural counties and dealing with this issue of access to care.”
Goals of the grant
The grant will be used to pilot a sustainable network of care to provide quality obstetrical care in rural environments. One of the grant’s key milestones will be to build a teleradiology component.
By using this process of transmitting radiologic images such as ultrasounds and X-rays, radiologists will be able to service patients without being in the same location.
“This grant has money aligned to it to buy us to some simulators that are a really phenomenal piece of equipment that kind of teach the tactile sensation of doing the images and on the right plane and the right amount of pressure and to get the best images,” Weis said.
“And then maternal fetal medicine specialists from Kansas City that are experts in that area in ultrasonography are going to be working with the sonographers from the local communities and training them. And then we hope to set up a teleradiology component that builds upon that training with those with maternal fetal medicine specialists.”
