According to a March of Dimes report released earlier this month, eight Nevada counties are currently considered maternity care deserts, meaning they lack adequate obstetric care.
The “Nowhere to Go” report shows that the Nevada counties lacking access to routine labor and delivery services are concentrated in the state's central and northern areas.
That includes Nye, Pershing, Eureka, Storey, Lyon, Douglas, Mineral, and Esmeralda counties.
That same collection of counties is also home to zero obstetric clinicians.
March of Dimes chief medical and health officer Michael Warren said people tend to underestimate the impact these deserts have on families, who have to travel three times longer to access this type of care than people who live close to obstetric services.
"I think sometimes when we think about these maternity care deserts, we think, 'Oh, this is just an inconvenience because people have to drive farther,'" said Warren. "The driving farther is a definite piece of this, but the reality is there are worse outcomes for people who live in these deserts. Moms who live there less likely to get all the prenatal care they need. They're more likely to give birth preterm to their babies, and in fact, that mom and her baby are more likely to die than those who live in a full access area. So this is not just an inconvenience. This this truly can mean life or death."
These maternity desert designations come amid news from Henderson Hospital, which announced it will close its Maternity care ward and NICU unit at the end of September. Those soon-to-end maternity services were the next-closest option for Boulder City patients, as Boulder City Hospital has no functional maternity ward.
Though the hospital did not respond to KNPR's request for comment, a press release from leadership cited an ongoing lack of available emergency department beds as the primary catalyst for its decision to discontinue (and repurpose space from) birth services.
But Warren notes that, for many hospitals, financial stressors could also be at play.
"Many [hospitals] report not being able to adequately finance those services, and if the hospitals are not going to provide those services, there's not somewhere for those obstetric clinicians to practice.”
There are solutions on the horizon, though, including a drug currently in the research phase that could both prevent and halt preterm labor — an outcome that can be particularly disastrous for people in maternity care deserts.
"In Nevada, about one in nine births are preterm. In 2024, we had 3,500 babies who were born preterm or very preterm in the state," said Scott Barnett, an assistant professor at UNR who's leading the drug's research. "There are actually no FDA-approved drugs right now that can stop labor after it starts. So we have zero therapeutic options."
It's made the research that much more critical, said Barnett, especially since it takes many years and large amounts of funding to get through the research and clinical trial stages — something that Barnett said is still ongoing.
"It costs normally $2-4 billion to bring a drug to market for a whole host of reasons, but it's a slow, methodical process," said Barnett. As he and his team study the possibility of repurposing existing FDA-approved drugs in the interim, he anticipates a long timeline. "The reality is, is that if this continues to prove to be successful for us, it could be just a matter of a few years before this would be in some more substantive clinical trials."
Guests: Scott Barnett, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, UNR; Michael Warren, chief medical and health officer, March of Dimes
