As part of our collective impact approach, FLOURISH’s goal is to connect organizations offering health services and social services in the areas most impacted by infant mortality. One key partner in this is the St. Louis Integrated Health Network (IHN), which recently received a Missouri Foundation for Health grant to expand its work to increase infant vitality by enhancing the group prenatal care model, CenteringPregnancy.
CenteringPregnancy is a national model of prenatal care that utilizes a group setting to monitor, educate, and provide mutual peer support to pregnant women. In addition, CenteringPregnancy provides pregnant women with more face-to-face time with their medical providers, and brings women out of exam rooms and into a group setting with other pregnant moms. Patients in CenteringPregnancy meet at least 10 times throughout their pregnancy and their prenatal care appointments occur within the group setting. Each visit lasts 2 hours, so mothers end up spending 10 times more quality time with their medical providers by the time they finish their last visit compared to typical pregnancy care.
IHN collaborates with community health centers, hospital systems, academic medical schools, public health departments and other safety net institutions to increase access to high-quality, affordable healthcare for underserved St. Louis residents. The grant IHN received from MFH is Enhanced Centering Pregnancy Plus Community and the grant’s goal is to better address the impacts of chronic stress and trauma through the integration of behavioral health and medical health services in order to improve positive outcomes for pregnant women and their newborns. Enhanced CenteringPregnancy uses the CenteringPregnancy model to prepare women for motherhood, but also offers interventions for patients to reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress that can negatively impact a pregnancy.
The St. Louis Centering Community is a collaborative working on Enhanced CenteringPregnancy, which consists of CenteringPregnancy providers, key maternal and child health professionals, graduated CenteringPregnancy mothers, and IHN, all of whom have contributed significantly to the grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health. By adding enhancements, such as trauma-informed care and behavioral health components, CenteringPregnancy is further bridging the racial disparities seen with infant mortality. IHN and Enhanced CenteringPregnancy value racial equity as essential to health equity and is establishing processes for how racial equity is involved in curriculum enhancements, evaluation, CenteringPregnancy facilitator development, and implementation of the Enhanced CenteringPregnancy curriculum.
“IHN is here to be a safety net for the underserved members of our community,” said Kelly McKay, Program Coordinator for Enhanced CenteringPregnancy at IHN. “Enhanced CenteringPregnancy is convening community medical partners providing CenteringPregnancy and graduated CenteringPregnancy mothers with the goal of increasing a collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach to the continuum of care. The goal of the initiative is to provide our partners with tools to counteract the high levels of stress expecting mothers face, with the goal of decreasing low birth weights, pre-term births and time spent in the NICU. It’s especially important that providers serving moms who live in these most impacted areas understand the trauma these families face on a daily basis and better understand the barriers patients experience when accessing supports and services.”
Enhanced CenteringPregnancy works in collaboration with six sites in the St. Louis area providing CenteringPregnancy programs. IHN coordinated and collaborated with Alive and Well STL to provide introductory trainings to perinatal health teams at Affinia Healthcare, SSM St. Mary’s/St. Louis University, and Barnes Jewish Hospital/Washington University, and introductory trauma training and community empowerment sessions for the graduated CenteringPregnancy mothers participating in the initiative. CenteringPregnancy providers, key maternal and child health professionals and graduated CenteringPregnancy mothers participated in an intensive three-day collective trauma training. In addition, as part of the enhancement, providers will receive additional training in trauma awareness and implementation of behavioral health interventions.
“Enhanced CenteringPregnancy has the opportunity to account for the trauma and chronic stress many of our patients experience and provide improved response and screening for behavioral health needs,” said McKay. “Evaluation teams are establishing their anticipated outcomes and the curriculum team is actively adding enhancements into the curriculum.”
IHN is among several organizations who have received collaborative grants from the Missouri Foundation for Health to create programs that will help reduce infant mortality in St. Louis. Learn more about the other projects that are contributing to this goal.