Series: Lost Mothers Maternal Care and Preventable Deaths

In response to alarming racial disparities, New York City announced a new initiative last week to reduce maternal deaths and complications among women of color. Under the new plan, the city will improve the data collection on maternal deaths and complications, fund implicit bias training for medical staff at private and public hospitals, and launch a public awareness campaign.

Over the next three years, the city will spend $12.8 million on the initiative, with the goal of eliminating the black-white racial disparity in deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth and cutting the number of complications in half within five years.

“We recognize these are ambitious goals, but they are not unrealistic,” said Dr. Herminia Palacio, New York City’s deputy mayor for health and human services. “It’s an explicit recognition of the urgency of this issue and puts the goal posts in front of us.”

The city’s health department is targeting nearly two dozen public and private hospitals over four years, focusing on neighborhoods with the highest complication rates, including the South Bronx, North and Central Brooklyn, and East and Central Harlem. Hospital officials will study data from cases that led to bad outcomes, and staff will participate in drills aimed at helping them recognize and treat those complications.

Health department officials approached SUNY Downstate Medical Center in May to serve as a pilot site for many of the new measures.

Read More How Hospitals Are Failing Black Mothers A ProPublica analysis shows that women who deliver at hospitals that disproportionately serve black mothers are at a higher risk of harm.

The Central Brooklyn hospital was featured in the “Lost Mothers” series published by ProPublica and NPR last year as one of the starkest examples of racial disparities among hospitals in three states, according to our analysis of over 1 million births in Florida, Illinois and New York. In the second half of last year, two women, both black, died shortly after delivering at SUNY Downstate from causes that experts have said are preventable. The public, state-run hospital has one of the highest complication rates for hemorrhage in the city.

“We look forward to working with all of our partners to provide quality maternal health care for expectant mothers,” said hospital spokesperson Dawn Skeete-Walker.

“SUNY Downstate serves a unique and diverse population in Brooklyn where many of our expectant mothers are from a variety of different backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures.”

The city will also specifically target its own public hospitals, which are run by NYC Health + Hospitals, training staff on how to better identify and treat hemorrhage and blood clots, two leading causes of maternal death.

The initiative is “aimed at using an approach that encourages folks to have a sense of accountability without finger pointing or blame, and that encourages hospitals to be active participants to identify practices that would benefit from improvement,” said Palacio.

In addition to training, the city’s public hospitals will hire maternal care coordinators who will assist high-risk pregnant women with their appointments, prescriptions and public health benefits. Public hospitals will also work to strengthen prenatal and postpartum care, including conducting hemorrhage assessments, establishing care plans, and providing contraceptive counselling, breastfeeding support and screening for maternal depression.

Starting in 2019, the health department plans to launch a maternal safety public awareness campaign in partnership with grassroots organizations.

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“This is a positive first step in really being able to address the concerns of women of color and pregnant women,” said Chanel Porchia-Albert, founder and executive director of Ancient Song Doula Services, which is based in New York City. “There need to be accountability measures that are put in place that stress the community as an active participant and stakeholder.”

The city’s initiative is the latest in a wave of maternal health reforms following the “Lost Mothers” series. Over the past few months, the U.S. Senate has proposed $50 million in funding to reduce maternal deaths, and several states have launched review committees to examine birth outcomes.

As ProPublica and NPR reported, between 700 and 900 women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth in the United States every year, and tens of thousands more experience severe complications. The rate of maternal death is substantially higher in the United States than in other affluent nations, and has climbed over the past decade, mostly driven by the outcomes of women of color.

While poverty and inadequate access to health care explain part of the racial disparity in maternal deaths, research has shown that the quality of care at hospitals where black women deliver plays a significant role as well. ProPublica added to research that has found that women who deliver at disproportionately “black-serving” hospitals are more likely to experience serious complications — from emergency hysterectomies to birth-related blood clots — than mothers who deliver at institutions that serve fewer black women.

Read More Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth Not education. Not income. Not even being an expert on racial disparities in health care.

In New York City, the racial disparity in maternal outcomes is among the largest in the nation, and it’s growing. According to a recent report from New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, even as the overall maternal mortality rate across the city has decreased, the gap between black and white mothers has widened.

Regardless of their education, obesity or poverty level, black mothers in New York City are at a higher risk of harm than their white counterparts. Black mothers with a college education fare worse than women of all other races who dropped out of high school. Black women of normal weight have higher rates of harm than obese women of all other races. And black women who reside in the wealthiest neighborhoods have worse outcomes than white, Asian and Hispanic mothers in the poorest ones.

“If you are a poor black woman, you don’t have access to quality OBGYN care, and if you are a wealthy black women, like Serena Williams, you get providers who don’t listen to you when you say you can’t breathe,” said Patricia Loftman, a member of the American College of Nurse Midwives Board of Directors who worked for 30 years as a certified nurse-midwife in Harlem. “The components of this initiative are very aggressive and laudable to the extent that they are forcing hospital departments to talk about implicit bias.”