A call center aimed at providing proactive postpartum help to Arkansans will expand by the end of this year, intent on reaching every new mother in the days after she gives birth.
The center started making calls on May 1, said Dr. Nirvana Manning, director of the new Arkansas Center for Women and Infants’ Health. The Proactive Postpartum Call Center is one of three initiatives spearheaded by the center and paid for by a $5 million congressional earmark it received last fall, she said.
Rather than waiting for mothers to call with questions they might not know to ask, the call center will call them and provide information, resources and follow up care, said Manning, who is also the head of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences’ obstetrics and gynecology department.
Arkansas has some of the worst maternal health statistics in the United States — a point made repeatedly by speakers and panelists at a Wednesday roundtable hosted by ACWHI and UAMS and the Arkansas Hospital Association. This is especially true for people of color. Black women in Arkansas are twice as likely to have pregnancy-related complications as white women, according to Manning.
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Arkansas has seen a number of its labor and delivery units close since the pandemic, worsening existing maternal care deserts in parts of the state.
Manning discussed the center’s initiatives as part of the Arkansas Maternal Health Roundtable, which focused on statewide strategies and collaboration to address the state’s maternal health crisis.
In attendance were the more than 100 administrators and clinicians from the state’s birthing hospitals; policy advocates; Republican U.S. Sen. John Boozman, who helped obtain the center’s startup funds; and state lawmakers, including GOP Reps. Aaron Pilkington of Knoxville and Lee Johnson of Greenwood.
The 2025 legislative session featured a number of bills aimed at improving maternal health outcomes in Arkansas. Pilkington’s efforts to expand postpartum Medicaid eligibility were unsuccessful, but other maternal health legislation passed with bipartisan support.
The Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies Act, supported by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, grants pregnant Arkansans presumptive Medicaid eligibility — essentially fast-tracking their applications for state insurance coverage — allows doulas and community health workers to be reimbursed by the state, and established coverage for certain kinds of pregnancy-related care.
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Medicaid covers more than half of births in Arkansas, according to Arkansas Department of Human Service officials.
Cara Osborne, senior fellow at policy group Heartland Forward and a nurse midwife, said that the next steps are overcoming hesitance and barriers to embedding doulas and midwives in pregnancy care in the state.
Doulas, while not licensed in the same way that midwives or other providers are, “can provide incredible emotional and psychological support for moms” said Osborne. Doulas can give pregnant women the kind of one-on-one attention that providers sometimes can’t, she said.
“The doula should be every delivery provider’s best friend,” Osborne said. “It’s an extra set of hands and an extra voice and support as you’re trying to do the best you can to take care of the patients who often are outnumbering you pretty significantly.”
As part of a separate law passed this year, Act 965, the state will also begin to certify doulas.
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Arkansas “desperately” needs more doulas and midwives, Manning said.
“Now that we have legislation that helps support the billing aspect, we need to build these programs,” Manning said. “We need to create trust and community.”
But improving access to doulas and midwives is just one issue. Pregnant women also face barriers in receiving care or knowing when they need to seek it, Manning said, and factors such as an inability to get child care or being told their symptoms are normal can prevent them from obtaining timely care.
In addition to the call center, ACWIH wants to distribute maternal health kits and bracelets with QR codes that link to postpartum education and resources at myarkansasbirth.org.
The bracelets, which the center began distributing earlier this year, also serve another purpose — providing a visual alert to doctors and people around the wearer that they recently gave birth.
“A blood pressure of 140 over 90 is not something that most ER doctors would care anything about if a patient shows up with that,” Manning said. But if a postpartum woman showed up presenting the same, “I care. I care a lot about it.”
The kits also contain diapers, wipes, vitamin D and other supplies that women will need after giving birth, Manning told conference attendees. UAMS began distributing them to its postpartum patients earlier this year.
One of the goals of the roundtable was to get all the birthing hospitals in one place to try to get them on board with the center’s initiatives, Manning said. The kits and the bracelets are also funded by the center’s federal grant, but she said they need buy-in from the state’s other hospitals to distribute them to mothers beyond UAMS.
“We need our partners, which is why we convened all of them rather than me reach out one-on-one to all these hospitals,” Manning said. “We got them all together so that we can kind of create those implementation partners.”
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