A Lifeline for Moms: Chapter 5 – The Future of Maternal Care
Burnett School of Medicine students are researching ways to improve maternal and infant mortality rates in North Texas.
FORT WORTH – Tackling a major health care issue like morbidity and mortality among women and infants is a task that requires health care professionals from all levels working to find solutions.
Lucy Eletel, MS4 at Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University, is turning her passion for patient care for women and children into much needed medical research on maternal care.
“It’s important to get the whole community working on it together,” Eletel said.
Eletel and five other students at Burnett School of Medicine at TCU have dedicated their mandatory four-year Scholarly Pursuit & Thesis (SPT) research projects to finding answers to the high mortality and morbidity rates for women and infants in North Texas.
In addition to the students’ research, the medical school launched the North Texas Maternal Health Accelerator (MHA), which is conducting medical research around iron supplements to improve maternal morbidity rates.
The students efforts to cultivate new ideas on improving maternal care support the MHA’s mission for North Texas, according to Stuart D. Flynn, M.D., Founding Dean of Burnett School of Medicine.
“TCU is a part of the Fort Worth family and we’re all in this together that’s how I see this,” Dean Flynn said. “The research our students are doing dovetails beautifully with what we’ve been doing.”
Eletel is hoping her research will add valuable insight into finding solutions for Fort Worth’s high mortality and morbidity rates among women and infants. She is using data from Cook Children’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and birthing centers in Tarrant County to see if out-of-hospital births are associated with more adverse outcomes for infants and if those infants need more health care utilization.
“From what we can see, it’s yes and yes to both of those questions,” Eletel said.
She is also looking to find out what is motivating pregnant women to deliver outside the traditional hospital setting. The insight could also shed light on what health care providers can do to reduce the need for out-of-hospital births.
Working on maternal care issues together is ultimately how we’re going to make the most change, Eletel said.
Eletel is being mentored through this process by David Riley, M.D., Assistant Professor at the Burnett School of Medicine and a neonatologist at Cook Children’s. He specializes in treating infants after birth who may be born with congenital issues, birth complications or trauma that would require them to be admitted into the intensive care unit.
With Dr. Riley’s help, Eletel has been able to analyze data from 132 neonatal intensive care unit admissions at Cook Children’s from 2019 through 2024 to see what percentage of infants admitted into the ICU were delivered at birthing centers or were at-home deliveries experiencing complications.
“The preliminary look that we’ve had on the data certainly shows that the infants that come to our care from those facilities have a very high burden of disease,” Dr. Riley said. “We don’t have a really good sense of how many babies are being delivered in this situation; we only see the ones that come to us.”
Eletel is also working with eight birthing centers across Tarrant County to collect data about their standard of care during deliveries.
“We don’t know what the standard of care is,” Eletel said. “It’s important to get all the facts in order to have a standardized approach to the research. If some birthing centers or some home birth midwives are approaching those things differently that can ultimately affect the data.”
Hospitals in Tarrant County follow guidelines from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics for delivery and care of newborns. Eletel is hoping her research can push for the creation of standard of care guidelines for birthing centers and at-home births to help reduce morbidity and mortality rates among women and infants.
“It’s not going to get done to lower that infant mortality rate if it’s just one birthing center or just one hospital is in on it,” Eletel said. “We ultimately have to come together on this.”