Accessing maternal care in rural areas is often a challenge. These days, over 55% of rural hospitals don’t even provide birthing services, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.
So the Hope Women’s Resource Clinic, based in Beaumont, Texas, is hitting the road and bringing care to patients.
The maternal health clinic launched a “mobile medical unit” in 2020, and in 2023 switched to a 38-foot van that has two exam rooms, a waiting area, and a lab, Jeanette Harvey, executive director of the clinic, told Healthcare Brew. The mobile unit provides free care for pregnant people and only operates in Texas, mainly serving Jefferson, Orange, Hardin, Chambers, and Galveston counties surrounding Beaumont, a city of 115,000+ people.
“There’s nothing like us—nobody that does what we do,” Harvey said.
The mobile unit was created after clinic staff realized how hard it was for patients to reach them without access to public transportation, she said. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reported that 21% of US adults who didn’t have vehicle or public transit access could not access “needed medical care” in 2022.
The facility initially started to provide Lyfts for patients in need of transportation, but soon realized it would be easier to go to them instead, according to Harvey.
It runs Monday through Thursday and serves each area consistently—always Jefferson County on Mondays, for example.
Services. In Texas, patients can get access to Medicaid coverage if they are pregnant (the Texas Standard reported 468,000 of 31.3 million Texas residents were pregnant and on Medicaid as of 2022), so a big part of the clinic’s work is conducting the medical testing required to get patients covered.
“If somebody’s trying to get on insurance, they don’t want to go somewhere where they have to pay to get proof that they need to be on insurance,” Harvey said, explaining that people need to provide documentation of pregnancy from a medical examiner to qualify for Medicaid.
The unit conducts ultrasounds and STD testing and also has the Hope Academy, which provides educational resources to parents until their baby turns one, according to Harvey.
At the academy, any parent patient of the clinic can take in-person or online classes about healthy behaviors, like going to the doctor and exercising, in exchange for points that help them access donated baby beds, car seats, diapers, wipes, and formula, Harvey said. The clinic delivers these items via the mobile unit.
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Staff includes a medical director, a radiologist, an ob-gyn, registered nurses, licensed sonographers, a life coach, and a licensed counselor. The unit also provides a list of doctors that are covered by Medicaid.
The Hope Clinic does not receive government funding, Harvey said, operating solely on donations.
Growth. The clinic served about 3,800 patients in total in 2023, 273 of which were at its mobile unit. The total was nearly 4,700 total last year, 399 of which were mobile patients. It’s on track to treat 500 people through its mobile unit by the end of this year, Harvey said.
Additionally, the Hope Clinic is adding a physical site in Port Arthur, a city in Jefferson County about 30 minutes from the clinic’s main location, Harvey said. Once that building is finalized—they’re aiming for the end of the year, she said—staff will take the mobile unit to another area that’s yet to be determined.
At the Beaumont site, the clinic just opened a 3,400-square-foot parenting center, Harvey said, with the aim of serving parents and babies up to three years after birth.
“That’s where we see a lot more of the need,” she said, “beyond the prenatal.”
Babies do a lot of development in those first three years, which can have lasting effects on their life, the national Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University reported in 2021.
The clinic acquired in 2020 donated property across the street, where it plans to build a shelter to support unhoused women and children. Harvey said the center’s waiting for $500,000 in funding to come through, but once it’s built, the shelter will have a caretaker on-site and operate as sort of a “mini hotel” to allow families to find permanent housing.
Zooming out. R Cody Stringer, senior director of innovation and product development at nonprofit March of Dimes, which has a number of mobile maternity units and works to improve maternal and infant care, said in an emailed statement the vans are “a lifeline for the families without access to appropriate pregnancy care.”
According to March of Dimes, only 2% of mobile health units in the US offer maternity care.
“We need more of these community-based interventions to ensure every mom and baby can access quality care, no matter where they live,” Stringer said.