In response to alarming maternal mortality and morbidity trends, Maine AHEC has supported various activities over the past 18 months focused on education, advocacy, and support for Maine’s maternal health workforce. In order to share successful strategies and lessons learned, we collaborated with AHECs in four other states (Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Nevada) to produce a toolkit titled Plan and Host a Learning Event: Racial Disparities in Maternal Health Outcomes based on each AHEC’s experience producing an event. All together, these learning events engaged over 440 participants.
The toolkit, which was released in November, 2024, highlights core event elements that led to success, including: screening a documentary, showcasing locally relevant data, dynamic interaction between participants and an interprofessional panel of experts, and evaluation. The power of storytelling, lived experience, and understanding the link between local and maternal health trends is emphasized.
This project was part of a National AHEC Organization initiative led and funded by The Maternal Health Learning and Innovation Center (MHLIC); it address the broader goals to “encourage and support” other organizations in replicating learning events, to promote equity, and to “inspire future and current health professionals to pursue careers in maternal health”.
An abstract presenting the process for tool kit development and recommendations for learning event replication was accepted to the National AHEC Organization 2025 Biennial Conference: Racing Toward Health Workforce Solutions; Maine AHEC’s experience examining maternal health equity related to changing population demographics and decreasing access to care in rural communities will be highlighted.
