Identifying Priority Counties to Expand Doula Care Services in North Carolina

The purpose of this paper is to identify priority counties for North Carolina to introduce community-based doula care programs based on current maternal health outcomes and social determinants of health. Rural counties were expected to be the top priority areas to introduce doula care programs. To determine priority areas, we created a scoring system and used linear least squares regression models and beta weights to determine how many points to assign each proposed component of the scoring system. Once the scoring system was created, we scored each county based on how well they performed for each maternal health or social determinant of health indicator. The findings indicated that rural counties would benefit the most from expansion of doula care services.Bachelor of Science in Public Healt