Pregnancy, labor, postpartum complications, and newborn needs don’t stop during emergencies. Yet many disaster preparedness plans still treat maternity as a downstream clinical issue rather than a time-sensitive mobility, communication, and coordination problem that starts at home, in a birth center, on the road, or in an overwhelmed emergency department (ED).

The Step Up Together® Program is built around the exact capabilities emergency planning often lacks:

• interdisciplinary relationship-building,
• standardized transfer workflows, and
• realistic drills that begin in community settings and end in hospitals. 

An Underused Asset

During a disaster scenario normal services are often disrupted, requiring planning for continuity of care and rapid action if labor or urgent warning signs occur.  Professional guidance from ACOG and the CDC call out the need to plan for obstetric needs during disasters. The needs of pregnant and postpartum people rarely require clinical knowledge alone. Often where there is a breakdown is with coordination:

1. Contact and routing failures
2. Transportation friction
3. Handoff breakdowns

Midwives and other community maternity care providers often have the most practical insight on these coordination problems. Community birth teams already specialize in reaching and moving people. These teams spend their careers solving the problems emergency plans struggle with, such as:

• Maintaining reliable communication with families across changing conditions
• Recognizing early deterioration and escalating quickly
• Navigating logistics and transport under time pressure
• Building trust that makes people more likely to follow guidance during emergencies

And critically: they know how transfers actually happen, not how a policy says they happen. This is why national patient-safety work on transfers emphasizes respectful communication, planning, and system readiness—not just a one-time protocol. 

Is Your Community Perinatal Disaster Ready?

In a high quality “perinatal disaster readiness” model, a region has a trained, practiced transfer network and a  shared operating picture: who needs what, where, and how they’ll get moved. Is this happening in your community? 

A Quick Self-Assessment:

Communication

• Do pregnant/postpartum families know exactly where to go if their hospital/clinic is closed? 
• Do community birth teams, EMS, EDs, and L&D units share a contact pathway?

Transport and Routing

• Have you identified “plan B” and “plan C” receiving facilities for maternity/newborn care (including when a region evacuates)?
• Have EMS and community birth settings practiced a laboring-patient transport scenario recently?

Handoffs

• Is there a standardized “transfer packet” (minimum data set) that can move even when EHR access is disrupted?
• Have you drilled the handoff from community → EMS → hospital in real time?

Equity and Access

• Does your plan explicitly include families with limited transportation, limited English proficiency, housing instability, or rural isolation (the people most likely to be cut off first)?

If you can’t answer “yes” to all of these, you have a preparedness opportunity!

The Step Up Together Program Steps In

The most important disaster plan for pregnant people is the one that has been rehearsed across settings with the same partners who will be on the phone at 2 AM when roads are flooded and a patient is in labor.

Step Up Together offers an immediately deployable way to practice the hardest part of perinatal emergency readiness: cross-setting transfers under stress.

Step Up Together is explicitly designed to strengthen collaboration and emergency response across the “primary maternity care ecosystem,” including community-based care, outpatient and home-based care, community and critical access hospitals, EMS/transport, and community service agencies. 

Key preparedness features include:

1. Realistic transfer drills that begin where disasters begin: in the community – Step Up Together Action Collaboratives culminate in a Full Transfer Drill that starts in a home or birth center, moves by ambulance, and ends at the referral hospital.

2. “Ready-to-use” drill kits and coaching (so you don’t reinvent the wheel) – Action Collaboratives include training sessions and drill kits to run full or partial emergency transfer drills across intrapartum, postpartum, and neonatal scenarios, tailored locally.

3. A structured learning loop – Step Up Together Drill Kits support interdisciplinary emergency transfer drills, and the program includes a “Community Debrief” to surface lessons learned and spread improvements across sites.

Let’s Prepare Together

The question isn’t whether your community will face a crisis; it is whether pregnant people and newborns are protected by a system that has already practiced working together.

Here are your next steps:

1. Ask “What is our plan for pregnant people, people in labor, and newborns during a disaster, and when was the last time we practiced it?”
2. Convene your cross-sector group and plan a perinatal transfer drill – Step Up Together can help!

Contact us below for more information.