NICHQ News

NICHQ and child education outcomes leader StriveTogether today announced six communities will participate in their joint initiative. Called the StriveTogether Prenatal to Age 3 Impact and Improvement Network, the goal is to ensure kindergarten readiness for children by focusing on healthy beginnings, family support, quality care and excellent learning environments from infancy to age 3.

NICHQ is proud to announce two new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded projects that aim to do just that. The projects tackle different early childhood levers and seek to address key drivers for improving early childhood outcomes through early childhood systems improvement.

Innovative early childhood health leader Jill Sells, MD, FAAP, is joining the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ) as its Clinical Director of Early Childhood Initiatives. Sells brings decades of experience leading equity-focused, early childhood, system-level efforts that have led to improved children’s health outcomes.

Well-known pediatrician and childhood obesity researcher Elsie Taveras, MD, MPH, has been elected to the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ) Board of Directors. She brings extensive experience and passion for understanding social determinants of health and developing interventions across the life course to prevent obesity and chronic diseases, especially in underserved populations.

As part of a $6.5 million partnership funded by the Pritzker Children’s Initiative (PCI), NICHQ, in collaboration with StriveTogether, will be leading an initiative to support early childhood health. It focuses on increasing school readiness and reducing disparities in children ages birth to 3 by building the capability of local providers to track and leverage data to drive improvement.

NICHQ is proud to announce it was selected to be the coordinating center for the National Network of Perinatal Quality Collaboratives (NNPQC). In this role, NICHQ will serve as the resource hub for state-based perinatal quality collaboratives (PQCs) working on initiatives to improve maternal and child health outcomes. More specifically, NICHQ will provide change management and quality improvement (QI) technical assistance and facilitate network communication.

NICHQ’s expertise in running collaborative improvement and innovation networks (CoIINs) has landed it the role of leader of all CoIIN activities for a new Maternal and Child Environmental Health Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (MCEH CoIIN). The program aims to improve systems of care to address the needs of maternal, infant and child populations that are at risk for or experience exposure to lead.

The Maternal and Child Health Bureau has chosen NICHQ to lead a national initiative aimed at making infant safe sleep and breastfeeding the national norm. The five-year National Action Partnership to Promote Safe Sleep Improvement and Innovation Network (NAPPSS-IIN) engages champions within the systems that intersect with infant caregivers and families at risk to disseminate infant safe sleep and breastfeeding messages.

As the leader of a multi-year, national initiative to reduce infant mortality rates and disparities across populations, NICHQ is heartened by the announcement March 21 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that U.S. infant mortality rates have decreased 15 percent from 2005 to 2014. The report also shows the U.S. infant mortality rate reached new lows for almost all populations.

NICHQ  is partnering in a research study of long-term impact of environmental exposures in neonatal intensive care units (NICU). The study, Developmental Impact of NICU Exposures (DINE), is led by investigators at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore/Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai with funding from the National Institutes of Health as part of its seven-year Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes initiative (ECHO).

Two new members have been elected to NICHQ’s board of directors. Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, PhD, MPA-URP, and Gregory Serrao both bring unique skills and experiences in improving healthcare services and social determinants of health and health equity for children and underserved populations.

NICHQ today announced the launch of its annual campaign to combat infant mortality in conjunction with Infant Mortality Awareness Month. Throughout the month of September, NICHQ will continue its efforts to bring awareness to the shockingly high infant mortality rate in the United States while helping empower women to prepare for healthy pregnancies that result in healthy children.