The University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing this week launched the Moms and Kids Mobile Health Clinic, an RV-based program designed to bring prenatal, pregnancy, postpartum, infant and pediatric care into rural Alabama communities.
Michele Talley, who leads the initiative as a professor and associate dean for clinical and global partnerships at the UAB School of Nursing, said the goal is to meet families where they live and remove the transportation barrier that keeps too many women from care. “Providing access to care improves health outcomes. We know that healthy moms have healthy babies, and those healthy babies grow up to be healthy adults,” she said.
The need is stark. The Alabama Department of Public Health estimated that almost 90% of women living in rural counties drive at least 30 minutes to get to a birthing hospital. State research also found that a quarter of women in Alabama had inadequate prenatal care in 2019, a gap that health workers say can affect both mothers and babies long before delivery day.
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The new mobile clinic is built around an RV funded by a grant through the university’s Strategic Investment Fund, and UAB is billing for Medicaid services as part of the sustainability plan. Talley said the team plans to work in counties that have long lacked easy access to care. “We know a lot of women do not get and receive prenatal care,” she said. “And so our mobile health unit is hoping, with other partners there, to go into those counties to provide those services so that we can provide the care and in the long term we can start to see an improvement in our maternal mortality and morbidity and then reduce premature births as well as infant mortality.”
The care team now includes a pediatric nurse practitioner, a nurse and a nurse informatician, with a certified nurse midwife and a social worker also set to join. The program also plans to add a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, a sign that UAB is trying to build something broader than a basic clinic visit. Maria Shirey, who is also part of the initiative, said the university sees behavioral and social support as part of the same job. “We have historically found with the care of women and children that there is a need for social and emotional support. And by virtue of that, we have social workers as part of our team and in addition to that, we’re going to be adding a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner to that team,” she said. “We are in a position to provide holistic care that addresses the needs of mothers and children, both physically and emotionally.”
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Before the RV was ready to deploy, the nursing team spent the past year working in Head Start Programs in Marengo, Wilcox and Choctaw counties, where it treated more than 120 patients. That stretch gave the program an early test run in three counties that are far from major medical centers and helped shape what the mobile unit would need once it hit the road.
The clinic is part of UAB’s women and children’s health initiative, which is advancing through teaching, research and collaborative practice to meet health care needs in Alabama. Shirey said the work is meant to last beyond the grant that helped launch it. “We are now billing for Medicaid services, which is part of the sustainability plan that goes beyond the grant funding period,” she said. For UAB, the question is no longer whether the clinic can start, but whether it can stay on the road and keep reaching the families rural Alabama has too often left behind.
