Andrea Thompson is a parent partner on the quality improvement team for the Kingwood Medical Center in Kingwood, TX, about 25 miles northeast of Houston. The hospital is participating in the Texas Ten Step Star Achiever Breastfeeding Learning Collaborative, which seeks to help hospitals improve their maternity care practices to better support mothers who choose to…
When Stephanie Birch, RNC, MPH, MS, was a new nurse in 1982, Alaska’s infant mortality rate was the highest in the nation. More than 30 years later, Alaska sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, with the lowest rate of infant deaths. While it wasn’t a quick fix, Birch says Alaska shows significant improvement…
About 80 percent of the women giving birth at CHRISTUS Hospital – St. Elizabeth in Beaumont, TX breastfeed with 50 percent exclusively breastfeeding during their stay. The exclusive rate is up 13 percent from just two years ago. The increase is a result of considerable efforts to retrain staff, eliminate formula giveaways, prioritize skin-to-skin bonding…
For women who smoke, quitting before or during pregnancy is one of the most powerful ways to improve birth outcomes and protect infants’ health. Not only known to damage the baby’s heart, lungs and brain and increase risk of birth defects, smoking during pregnancy is also closely associated with two leading causes of infant mortality: pre-term birth…
Carrying to full term helps safeguard against some of the greatest threats to infant health. Affecting about 1 in 10 babies born in the United States, preterm birth (i.e., birth before 37 weeks gestation) is a leading cause of infant mortality and a major contributor to long-term disability. Meanwhile, early-term infants (those born at 37 to 38…
I recently wrapped up teaching our intro quality improvement (QI) course, the ABCs of QI, for one of our partners, Family Voices. In the final webinar the participating teams shared the projects that they had worked on, and they reflected on the most useful strategy they learned—the concept of small tests of change. Testing ideas…
Washington state is known for having a low rate of infant mortality—fifth lowest in the U.S. But the state is still actively working on reducing infant mortality even further. In fact, leaders in the state are developing an interesting strategy that targets substance use. “Some relationships are pretty obvious,” says Kathy Ann Chapman, a manager…
Tammy Smith’s daughter, Precious, often got sick as a baby and she cried—a lot. “One time she was holding her arm and we thought it was broken, but it wasn’t. Another time she couldn’t even sit up. She would just cry and cry. The doctors kept giving us medicine, but it didn’t help,” recalls Tammy….
Last week I was sharing some of the exciting work happening in my NICHQ projects with my family and they asked (jokingly) what my boss had against me. You see, I’m expecting my first child in July and they couldn’t imagine how I could enjoy working on projects related to infant mortality. My take is…
Thousands of infants die each year in unsafe sleep conditions. Sadly, the majority of sleep-related deaths are preventable. One innovative and successful approach to reduce these tragedies is to train law enforcement, fire rescue squads and other first responders to educate families about safe sleep habits. “We have access to homes that no one else…