A group that lowered the city’s formerly sky-high infant mortality rate celebrated ten years of accomplishments — and resolved that it has much more work to do.
The celebration took place Thursday night at at Amarante’s in Morris Cove.
Healthy Start is a collaboration of health providers, government agencies and pregnant women themselves (called “consumers” for the purposes of winning the federal grant to make the project possible). The group formed to address an infant mortality rate in New Haven that once stood at 31 per 1,000 live births for African-American babies — a rate that rivaled many Third World countries.
Will Ginsberg is now head of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, which played a critical role in getting the program going. Back in 1986, he worked for then-Mayor Ben DiLieto. Thursday night he recalled how the mayor reacted when he got word of the high infant mortality rate.
“I remember the look on his face. I remember the word he used to describe the state of infant mortality in New Haven 22 years ago; the word was ‘shame.’”
The program’s executive director, Delores Greenlee (pictured at the top of the story), said in the past decade Healthy Start has served more than 8,000 women, enrolled more than 4,500 infants, and made sure that 92 percent of those women and 94 percent of those infants have medical homes, which helps ensure they get the care they need. (Click here for a story about medical homes.)
She said the overall infant mortality rate dropped to 7 per 1,000 live births in the three-year period ending in 2001, before rising again. She cautioned that even one additional death can cause the numbers to fluctuate wildly, because the overall number of deaths is small, out of about 2,000 babies born each year. But she said there’s still one major problem.
“Black infants are dying two-and-a-half times more than others before they reach their first birthday. So we certainly still have a lot more work to do.”
Since that drop seven years ago, the infant mortality rate increased again. Nobody’s sure why. One explanation of the earlier spike: African-American babies were more likely to share a bed with their mothers, who sometimes inadvertently rolled over on them. Click here for a previous story examining the trend.
Greenlee said the most recent data show a leveling off in the rate. She said, going forward, she expects two changes in the program.
One, in the application for the next phase of funding, the program will seek to expand its target population to women of child-bearing age, not just pregnant or post-partum women, in an effort to improve their health outcomes.
Two, “We will be in the community more, doing awareness and education. We recently began a collaboration with the Housing Authority to do health education workshops.”
Ginsberg presented several awards, including to a group of moms from Mothers for Justice who formed the core of the consumer component of the project. (Pictured is Tirzah Kemp, who’s been involved for the past decade.)
Ginsberg also handed an award to Amos Smith (pictured right and left in photo above), who served as the principal investigator and supervisor of the program from 1998 to 2006. (He now heads up the Community Action Agency.)
Smith thanked the group and said, “If you are to address the issues around mortality and morbidity, you’ve got to come ready to fight for poor women. And if you have anything less than that [commitment], you’re going to get beaten back by society. You should never let up on the right of women to have good care and babies that have a right to live healthy.”
At the end of the program, the foundation’s Angel Fernandez Chavarro (pictured) made a plug for a new endowment fund for Healthy Start and the Male Involvement Network. Through this collaboration almost half (48 percent) of Healthy Start infants live with a dad in the home, a significantly higher percentage than for low-income households in general.