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Gold-standard maternal mortality database in limbo as CDC staff placed on leave [1]
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Date: 2025-04-01
As part of the sweeping layoffs that rocked the Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday, the entire staff that oversaw an annual survey to better understand infant and maternal health — and that was considered the gold standard in the field — was placed on administrative leave.
The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, or PRAMS, is a dataset of survey responses from people who give birth, both before and after birth. The dataset has offered some of the most detailed insights into maternal health in the U.S., and has become an invaluable asset for researchers trying to better understand the country’s disproportionately high maternal mortality rates.
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The survey was overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but administered by 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands, which account for up to 81% of births in the country.
In an email sent to some of those states Tuesday afternoon, Jennifer Bombard, an epidemiologist at the CDC, wrote “I’m emailing to let you know that the entire CDC PRAMS team, including myself, has received the Reduction in Force (RIF) notice from HHS today.”
The future of the program was unclear. As part of its reorganization, HHS has said it will shift some units and even create an entirely new agency, the Administration for a Healthy America.
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“I am truly concerned about the potential impacts. With the loss of staff that support PRAMS, we risk a longer delay or loss of this important data resource for studying maternal health,” said Katy Kozhimannil, a health policy researcher at the University of Minnesota.
Spokespeople for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Data collection for PRAMS was previously paused, a move the CDC said was temporary, to ensure compliance with President Trump’s executive orders. At the time, researchers stressed the importance of the dataset in understanding the causes of maternal mortality and creating programs to mitigate it.
“I don’t know how else to say it, this data system is needed. It’s not an option. It’s part of having a functional public health system,” Marian Jarlenski, a professor of health policy at the University of Pittsburgh, said then.
The email sent to some states on Tuesday provided no guidance on what would happen next.
“At this point we do not know the implications for PRAMS as [a] surveillance project,” the brief email concluded. “As a PRAMS grantee, you will receive further guidance from CDC when we have further information.”
Have you been affected by cuts and restructuring at HHS?
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[1] Url:
https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/01/prams-maternal-mortality-cdc-layoffs/
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