Pregnancy Care Center

The medical services program provides pregnancy testing and limited obstetric ultrasounds with the oversight of a medical director, a local licensed, board-certified ob/gyn. Our chief nursing officer and staff registered nurses (rns) work alongside the coaches to provide medical information to clients. Our clients' feedback helps us measure success. We provide accurate, timely medical information to assist them with making informed decisions regarding their pregnancies. If they feel they have the information and resources they need to make those decisions, we consider that a success. In 2024, the medical services program served clients with 582 pregnancy tests and 480 ultrasounds. After amendment 3 passed, we have implemented a more extensive medical model for these clients, including connecting them with one of our staff rns as early in the process as possible, usually during the first phone call, text, or website inquiry. The nurse works closely with that client, providing medical services, limited coaching, and resource referrals (not abortion) until she has made a pregnancy decision. For those clients that decide to continue their pregnancy, we then enroll them in our traditional coaching and education programs. We hired another rn to accommodate this change. Abortion in all its forms was banned in missouri in june 2022, after the scotus decision to overturn roe v. Wade. However, despite them still being illegal, abortion pills are still widely available on websites and delivered to young people in their homes. This means adapting our client services approach to better meet the needs of these clients continues to be top of mind for us. For example, since these clients are often self-administering the abortion pills with no medical oversight, connecting them with our nurse team for a consultation earlier in the process to answer their questions is important for their safety and peace of mind. See narrative above regarding implementing a medical model. We want to continue to reach young women considering terminating their pregnancies to educate them about the realities and risks associated with self-administering abortions and answer other questions they have as they navigate the early stages of an unplanned pregnancy. We plan to continue building our medical services program through hiring additional staff nurses and adding another ultrasound machine to increase our capacity for serving more clients expediently.

Through the community education program, we provide relevant information concerning pcc's mission, approach, services, and impact within our service area, with a main goal of increasing awareness within our primary client demographic, young people aged 19-24. One of the primary ways we measure success in this program is tracking the number of clients we serve and how that compares to past years, especially in light of current marketing and outreach efforts. Much of our approach centers around our online presence through our websites and social media pages. We also maintain a presence on each of the four major college campuses, which allows us to increase awareness within our primary demographic. Other methods we use include building strong referral and collaborative relationships with other local nonprofit agencies, medical providers, and businesses at community events and forums. We ask each client, on our intake paperwork, how they heard about pcc to gauge how successful we are in increasing awareness. In 2024, pcc's campus ambassador program experienced continued success in reaching students with information about pcc's services and resources. We continued to distribute free, branded pregnancy tests with pcc's contact information inside each packet. Since that effort began in 2022, our campus outreach team has distributed nearly 3,000 pregnancy tests to students. We have continued to work toward developing our student group on missouri state university's (msu's) campus and increased our presence on other campuses, including drury university and evangel university. Our campus coordinator has fine-tuned our campus focus and branding with hopes of ultimately replicating this concept on other campuses. Since our primary demographic (college-aged people) is constantly shifting and changing, marketing to this group and maintaining continuity within our student group officers and members can be challenging. Our msu student group remained strong, and we took advantage of opportunities to increase our awareness on other university campuses. We are looking to expand our reach on the msu campus through our 417choices@msu student organization. We would ultimately like to replicate, or "franchise", this concept on other local college and university campuses. Another goal is to expand our pregnancy test distribution among the various resources on the college campuses, including ozarks technical community college and drury university. We also hope to engage students on these campuses to serve as ambassadors of pcc's mission among their fellow students until we have more firmly established student groups on those campuses.