The Oregon Perinatal Collaborative (OPC) visited each of Oregon’s 47 hospitals that provide labor, birth, and postpartum services in 2024 to learn about their strengths and challenges, build relationships, and gather information to ensure that our quality improvement work is responsive to the real needs of Oregon communities and hospitals. Our top priority in 2024 was to establish or strengthen communication and relationships with our essential partners, including each birthing hospital in Oregon, so that our improvement work reaches every birth. This report shares our findings from these visits.

While we expected to find some common experiences and concerns among Oregon hospitals, we were astounded to learn that the key areas of concern and core needs were essentially universal across the state from Critical Access Hospitals in rural and frontier counties to Level IV regional centers in urban areas. There were also crucial differences in the needs of rural and urban hospitals and unique concerns and needs in different parts of the state and across roles within the health care workforce. We have tried to capture the full depth and breadth of knowledge shared with us in these visits in a way that will be useful to all our partners including policymakers, hospital leadership, and funders.

The nurses, physicians, midwives, and hospital leaders at these visits across the state shared valuable insight and actionable information that can support everyone working to make Oregon a safe and welcoming place to be pregnant, give birth, be born and thrive within healthy communities. We are immensely grateful to everyone who participated for sharing with us during these visits.