Beacon Health System receives $5.4M grant for maternal and infant health
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South Bend-based Beacon Health System has been awarded $5.4 million from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration for the Healthy Start Initiative: Eliminating Disparities in Perinatal Health.
Spread across five years, the award enables Beacon to launch its Michiana Family Journey (MFJ) program to enhance birth outcomes, promote health equity and eliminate health disparities.
With service geared towards Elkhart and St. Joseph counties, MFJ will collaborate with community partners to integrate clinical and community-based services, improve maternal/infant home visits, care coordination and enhance community awareness on maternal and infant health, Beacon said.
“We’ve identified several organizations and clinicians that would be a part of a council to assist with sharing best practices, all the way down to community members, so potentially an expecting mom or a mother who has given birth, to be able to provide insights for our clinical team,” Kimberly Green Reeves, executive director of Beacon Community Impact said. “While Beacon has wonderful services, there are those social drivers that we’re going to need to lean into our community partners to assist us with.”
Indiana has the third-highest maternal mortality rate in the country. In 2021, white, non-Hispanic women saw a slight decrease in mortality rates from 2020 at 90 deaths per 100,000 live births while Black non-Hispanic mothers died at a rate of 153 deaths per 100,000 live births. County-specific data is currently unavailable. The Indiana Maternal Mortality Review Committee deemed 71% of pregnancy-associated deaths and 77% of pregnancy-related deaths preventable.
Reeves’ team is responsible for putting disease preventative measures in place and improving community health outcomes across St. Joseph, Elkhart and Marshall counties, as well as St. Joseph County in Michigan.
As part of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate, the team administers a community health needs assessment every three years. Beacon’s community strategy currently identifies health care access, mental health, maternal and infant health as a priority for the hospital, Reeves added.
Reeves talks about some other Beacon Community Impact programs for maternal and infant health.
The hospital system offers several family and infant support programs. Parents are encouraged to attend prenatal appointments, parenting classes or other activities and receive a coupon to shop at Beacon’s B.A.B.E store as an incentive. The organization also provides a doula support service.
Pregnant and postpartum moms can access free counseling through Beacon’s MBRACE program, and mental health classes for postpartum depression through its ROSE program.
“We also have a remote patient monitoring blood pressure program as a way to keep track of their blood pressures over a period of time, three months prior to giving birth and three months after birth,” Reeves said. “They’re monitored live and so whenever they do a reading at home it can be flagged if it is above normal.”
Goodwill Industries of Michiana is another organization addressing maternal and infant mortality in the region. It currently administers Indiana’s Nurse-Family Partnership in Elkhart, Lake, LaPorte and St. Joseph counties. The organization received $2.9 million to expand to 11 more counties over a year ago.
The evidence-based program pairs first time parents with a registered nurse during pregnancy and until the baby turns two.
“The nurse walks alongside the client to provide support, education, and work towards making sure that they have the resources they need to have a healthy pregnancy,” Rochelle Andruszkiewicz, director of the Nurse-Family Partnership said. “Infant mortality and maternal mortality are the biggest reasons that the program was brought to this area. This is an effort to support these families, help bridge those gaps and decrease those rates.”
Andruszkiewicz speaks about the care Nurse-Family Partnership provides to its families.
NFP nurses visit clients in their homes or wherever they feel most comfortable as they work towards building a trusting relationship. Nurses perform depression screenings, anxiety screenings and intimate partner violence screening. Baseline vital signs are also monitored, in the event of preeclampsia.
“We try to make sure that we have the clients paired with the best nurse for them to provide the best support. Unfortunately, it’s not always an option. Clients go to whichever nurse has capacity on their caseload at the time,” Andruszkiewicz said. “We encourage nurses to look at their implicit bias, because in order to help someone else, you have to be self aware. If you’re not aware that there’s an issue, you can’t do anything about it.”
Beacon’s MFJ program will also implement a customized Cycle to Respectful Care model developed by the National Birth Equity Collaborative aimed at diminishing bias, fostering trust and addressing disparities with a focus on addressing social determinants of health.
Beacon Community Impact also received funding from the health system’s Physician Philanthropy Council to come up with appropriate cultural competency training opportunities, bias training and trust training.
“I’m grateful for that because this training is not solely meant for the community alone or for clinicians alone; it’s a both-and,” Reeves said. “We often say to meet people where they are, but what does that really mean? And so when it comes to health literacy, understanding that patients have different levels of what something may mean to them when you’re talking about their care or their current state, and so ensuring that our clinical team understands that and can approach patients at a level that they understand and then vice versa, that patients also understand what is available to them within a health care system.”
Beacon is partnering with other community partners to ensure a uniform standard of care is available to all mothers.
“It’s not just internally but in the community as well, so other community organizations that provide support for expecting families can also benefit from this training as well,” Reeves said. “So now across the ecosystem of maternal health, we’re all speaking a common language and can assist with ensuring that mothers receive holistic care.”
This week is Nurses Week 2024, and this year’s theme focuses on the difference nurses make in the lives of the patients they care for. Nurses at NFP are a living testament of the theme, walking with their client’s through the good times of seeing kids turn two and through the bad times of maternal or infant mortality.
“It’s hard, not gonna lie. We haven’t had many losses, but it’s tough not only on the family, but for the nurse who’s worked hard to build that relationship with that family,” Andruszkiewicz said. “If it happens, the nurse will continue to provide some immediate grief support, connect the family to any resources in the community that could help with grief support, and then discharge them from there.”
Nurses also meet with their supervisors weekly for support.
“Goodwill has an employee assistance program and one of my nurses recently took advantage of counseling because of some tough situations with clients that were really weighing on her,” Andruszkiewicz said. “So just making sure that the nurses are really aware of the resources that are available to support them and not just the clients.”
Beacon Community Impact is currently working on a pop up pregnancy and family village open in August and September. They’re working with the University of Notre Dame to bring all the resources pregnant women need to one location and get them signed up for what they need while they’re there.
Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Terra Haute and Washington are the only other Indiana cities that also received the Healthy Start Initiative grant.