The momScore: How West Virginia Ranks For Maternal Health

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

While reading this week's Grand Rounds hosted this week at Suture for a Living, I jumped over to an interesting post by Dr. Val on an effort by her and Revolution Health to team up with medical experts and mommy bloggers to create a new health index for Mother's Day.

West Virginia ranks 38 out of 51 states on the momScore. As we head into this weekend's Mother's Day, Anna Marie Jarvis would want us to try to raise our ranking. I'm issuing a challenge to all West Virginia health care providers to think about and work on improving these statistics and metrics.

West Virginia received a a score of 69 out of a possible 100. The areas used for the ranking include: access to prenatal care, air quality, availability of childcare services, family paid leave policy, health care coverage rate, infant mortality, maternal mortality, risk of pregnancy complications, affordability of children's health insurance and violent crime rate.

If you want to discuss or debate West Virginia's rankings you can post your comments on the interactive momScore community.