The White House released the White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis (PDF - 912 KB).
Learn how HRSA commits to reducing maternal morbidity and mortality through five goals.
HRSA improves the well-being of mothers and pregnant people before, during, and after pregnancy through quality programs and the development of a skilled workforce.
Maternal Health Blueprint
Quick facts
- Pregnancy-related mortality has not improved over the past decade.1
- Non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, Black, and American Indian/Alaska Native women are at least two to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as non-Hispanic White women.1
- Pregnancy-related mortality is higher in rural counties than urban counties.1
- Thirty-five percent of all U.S. counties lack hospitals or birth centers offering obstetric care and without obstetric providers, with about 60% of these occurring in rural counties. 1
- Thousands of women experience unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short or long-term consequences to their health.2
- Four out of five pregnancy-related deaths are considered preventable.3
How do we promote maternal health?
- Title V Maternal and Child Health Block Grant
In all 59 states and jurisdictions, state departments of health determine their priorities and best approaches to improving health care services and systems for women and mothers. - Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Services (MIECHV)
Through voluntary home visiting services, uses proven methods to support pregnant people and parents with young children who live in communities that face greater risks and barriers to achieving positive maternal and child health outcomes. - Healthy Start
Through a community-based approach, improves a woman's health before, during, and after pregnancy and aims to advance equity and reduce racial and ethnic differences in rates of infant deaths. - National Maternal Mental Health Hotline
Provides 24/7, free, confidential support before, during, and after pregnancy. - Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health and Safety (AIM) and AIM Community Care (AIM CCI) Initiative
State-based teams support safe maternal care to reduce severe maternal illness and deaths in hospitals, community-based organizations, and outpatient clinical settings. - State Maternal Health Innovation Program
States collaborate with maternal health experts to address health disparities and improve outcomes, with a particular emphasis on preventing severe maternal illness and death. - Integrated Maternal Health Services
Creates and test models that integrate clinical care, behavioral health care, and social services for women who are underserved. - Women's Preventive Services Guidelines (WPSI)
Develops and shares national preventive health guidelines and resources for primary care settings. - Rural Maternity and Obstetrics Management Strategies Program
Increases access to maternal and obstetrics care in rural communities and ultimately improves maternal and neonatal outcomes through the establishment of networks to leverage local resources, coordinate care throughout the pregnancy, labor and delivery, and postpartum periods, utilize telehealth to connect to specialists, and develop models of care that are financially sustainable. - Screening and Treatment for Maternal Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders
Expands health care providers' ability to screen, assess, treat, and refer pregnant and postpartum women for depression and related disorders. - Maternity Care Nursing Workforce Expansion (MatCare)
Increases and diversifies the maternal and perinatal health nursing workforce through support for education and training in rural and underserved communities. - Primary Care Training Enhancement: Community Prevention and Maternal Health
Trains primary care physicians in maternal health care clinical services or population health in order to improve maternal health outcomes. - Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education
Supports primary care medical and dental residency programs, including obstetrics and gynecology, in outpatient settings in the community. - Loan repayment and scholarship programs
- Support providers of maternal services practicing or planning to practice in underserved areas including designating funding specifically for women's health nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and certified obstetrics and gynecology registered nurses in the Nurse Corps program.
- Maternity Care Target Area scores help ensure maternity care health professionals receiving National Health Service Corps (NHSC) Loan Repayment Program awards serve the communities where the need is the greatest. The NHSC Students to Service Loan Repayment Program offers a supplemental award to applicants who commit to completing an OB-GYN specialty and serving in a MCTA after residency or graduation.
Health Center Program
Health Centers provide primary medical, dental, mental health, substance use disorder, and patient support services to more than seven million women aged 15 to 44 years nationwide.At Health Centers:
- The number of obstetricians, gynecologists, and certified nurse midwives has grown by more than 3% in the past three years.
- In 2022, ~560,000 women received prenatal care. 72% of these women began receiving care during the first trimester.
- In 2022, providers performed more than 171,000 deliveries.
- Maternal Health Quality Improvement Fund
Thirty-five HRSA-funded health centers are developing patient-centered models of care delivery to improve maternal health outcomes, reduce disparities, and address the clinical and health-related social needs of their patients at the highest risk of maternal morbidity and mortality.
- Trends in Severe Maternal Morbidity in the US Across the Transition to ICD-10-CM/PCS From 2012-2019
- Associations Between State-Level Severe Maternal Morbidity and Other Perinatal Indicators
- Contribution of maternal age and pregnancy checkbox on maternal mortality ratios in the United States, 1978-2012
- Improved ascertainment of pregnancy-associated suicides and homicides in North Carolina
- A new performance measurement system for maternal and child health in the United States
- Rural Hospital Administrators' Beliefs About Safety, Financial Viability, and Community Need for Offering Obstetric Care
- State and Regional Differences in Access to Hospital-Based Obstetric Services for Rural Residents, 2018
- Making it Work: Models of Success in Rural Maternity Care
- Maternal Health Research Collaborative for Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs)
- For more research on rural maternal health visit: https://www.ruralhealthresearch.org/topics/maternal-health
- Maternal and Child Health Bureau Strategic Plan (PDF - 590 KB)
- Building the Maternal and Child Health Public Health Workforce of the Future: A Call to Action from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau Strategic Plan
- The HRSA Strategy to Address Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) (PDF) furthers HRSA's commitment to addressing IPV through training, partnerships, increased access, and addressing gap in knowledge. Work is underway on the next iteration of the Strategy, expected in early 2023
- Discretionary Grants Information System
Data on specific programs or performance measures. - Title V Information System (TVIS)
Includes performance data from federal sources (Federally Available Resource Document) that can be used to compare states or to look at various demographic factors such as race/ethnicity in order to identify, monitor, and address disparities. - Healthy Start Benchmarks (PDF)
Include several measures to monitor a mother's health. - Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Performance Indicators and Systems Outcomes (PDF - 137 KB)
Captures two main types of data that help us understand the outcomes of home visiting services. - Women's Health Workforce Projections Report
- Health Workforce Projections Tool
White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis
In support of the Biden-Harris Administration's efforts to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality, HRSA commits to the following goals:
Goal 1: Increase access to and coverage of comprehensive high-quality maternal health services, including behavioral health services
- Expand the Rural Maternity and Obstetrics Management Strategies Program.
- Establish a national, confidential, 24-hour, toll-free hotline for pregnant individuals and new mothers facing mental health challenges.
- Expand capacity to screen, assess, treat, and refer for maternal depression and behavioral disorders.
- Integrate behavioral health support such as navigators and community health workers into community settings.
Goal 2: Ensure those giving birth are heard and are decision makers in accountable systems of care
- Enroll every state in the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health program by 2023.
- Implicit bias training for clinicians who provide maternal health care services.
- Conduct a study with the National Academy of Medicine to make recommendations for incorporating bias recognition in clinical skills testing for accredited schools of medicine.
- Implement Pregnancy Medical Home demonstration sites.
- Fund community-based organizations to support projects to expand maternal mental health access.
Goal 3: Advance data collection, standardization, harmonization, transparency, and research
- Collect more and better data on social determinants of health, while also streamlining and improving data quality reporting for health centers.
- Fund research on rural maternal health and promote findings to local, state and national stakeholders.
- Fund minority-serving institutions to study health disparities in maternal health outcomes and develop curricula for training health professionals.
Goal 4: Expand and diversify the perinatal workforce
- Train more family medicine and obstetrics and gynecology providers in underserved settings through the Primary Care Training and Enhancement – Community Prevention and Maternal Health Program.
- Expand and diversify the number of nurses and certified midwives in underserved areas through programs such as Nurse Corps and Scholarships for Disadvantaged Students.
- Increase the number of Community Health Workers and health support workers in underserved areas.
- Identify areas within primary care Health Professional Shortage Areas with the highest need for maternity care health professionals and target resources there.
- Grow and diversify the doula workforce.
- Increase support for family medicine rural residency programs that include obstetrics training.
Goal 5: Strengthen economic and social supports for people before, during, and after pregnancy
- Partner with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to connect eligible families that receive housing assistance or reside in public housing with access to maternal and child health programs, such as home visits from a nurse or social worker.
HRSA and HHS-supported resources
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