Illinois is facing a rural healthcare crisis. FarmWeek’s Tammie Sloup wrote this week that 36 counties in Illinois have no hospitals offering obstetric care and no obstetric providers, according to a 2022 March of Dimes report.
And the problem of rural maternity care is getting worse, according to Pat Schou, executive director of the Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network.
Critical access care hospitals are in rural areas with 25 or fewer acute care inpatient beds. Shou said that in 1999 there were 28 in Illinois; today, there are just four.
