USF Health brings emergency pregnancy training to rural Florida without maternal care
Maternal health care training
The University of South Florida is sending medical educators into rural Florida communities to provide critical maternal health care simulation training to local hospital staff and first responders. FOX 13's Briona Arradondo reports.
TAMPA, Fla. - The University of South Florida is sending medical educators into rural Florida communities to provide critical maternal health care simulation training to local hospital staff and first responders.
Florida rural medical training
The backstory:
Fewer hospitals are delivering babies or providing maternity health care in rural Florida communities, forcing pregnant women to travel hours for care. In response, USF Health launched a state-funded maternal health care training program covering 16 rural counties.
The program is led by a partnership between Florida Center for EMS at USF, Florida Prenatal Quality Collaborative and Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation. It brings high-tech simulation mannequins directly into local patient rooms. These advanced simulators can mimic life-or-death scenarios like seizures, preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhaging.
"I was really surprised, because my background as a firefighter-paramedic I worked in an urban environment where I had those resources. But going out to the rural communities in the Panhandle, sometimes the transport time is over two hours away," said Penni Eggers, the director of education and assistant professor at the Florida Center for EMS at USF.
The program has already trained emergency personnel in Calhoun County, and the cities of Perry and Arcadia, teaching critical symptom management from the moment a patient enters an ambulance.
Saving mothers and babies
Why you should care:
According to Eggers, 80% of maternal deaths are preventable, and up to half happen after birth. Providing rural staff with hands-on tools builds the confidence needed to handle critical issues until a patient can be safely transferred to a specialized unit.
Emergency training sentiments
What they're saying:
"This is actually going to touch more people and save more lives, I think. This is more to me, one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done," Eggers said.
She added that after training, "they feel much more confident that they can handle an emergency maternal problem, and they feel that they have some tools now and resources that they can actually do their job."
Expanding medical simulation
What's next:
The mobile USF Health training team plans to head to Wauchula next to conduct its next simulation exercises for local health care workers.
The initiative began in 2025 as a successful pilot program in Franklin County. The positive results secured a grant through the Florida Department of Health to expand operations, which will fund the training for the next year or two.
The Source: The information in this story was gathered by FOX 13’s Briona Arradondo with the director of education Penni Eggers at USF Health’s Florida Center for EMS.