Thomas Breen photo
New Haven Healthy Start Director Kenn Harris.
With the help of an infusion of federal dollars, New Haven is dealing men into the process of ensuring babies are born alive and healthy.
That was part of the news Monday, when the 22-year-old New Haven Healthy Start (NHHS) announced it has received over $5.3 million in grant money from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).
Operated out of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (CFGNH), Healthy Start focuses on reducing the city’s infant mortality rate.
Monday’s presser on the fifth floor of 70 Audubon.
NHHS director Kenn Harris announced the receipt of the grant at a Monday morning press conference at the fifth-floor CFGNH at 70 Audubon St. He said the grant money will fund the program’s core care coordination services for another five years.
And for the first time in its two decade-plus history, Harris said, the grant money will be used specifically for working with at least 100 husbands and male partners every year to encourage them to actively participate in securing the good health of pregnant women and infant children in their lives.
“Building strong partnerships in the community is one of the reasons why New Haven Healthy Start has succeeded,” Harris said on Monday, “and it is the reason why we will continue to succeed.”
Community Foundation President Will Ginsberg said that, although NHHS was formally founded in 1997, the program actually dates back to the mid-1980s, when a group of local health professionals approached then-Mayor Biagio DiLieto about the gross racial and ethnic disparities in local infant mortality rates.
U.S. Rep Rosa DeLauro, also in attendance on Monday, said that New Haven’s infant mortality rate in the mid-1980s was at more than 20 deaths per 1,000 live births. As of 2016, that number had dropped by over a half to around seven deaths per 1,000 live births.
But that number is for women across all racial and ethnic groups, she said.
Community Foundation President Will Ginsberg.
According to NHHS statistics, the infant mortality rate for local black women between 2014 and 2016 was 11.50 deaths per 1,000 live births. That’s over double the 5.78 infant mortality rate for white women during that same period, and nearly quadruple the 3.64 infant maternal mortality rate for Hispanic women during that same time period.
“These disparities remain absolutely unconscionable,” Ginsberg said.
DeLauro added that the United States has a higher infant mortality rate than Kuwait and Kazakhstan. “The data points must be a call to action,” she said.
That’s where Harris’s program comes in.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.
NHHS places community outreach workers and care coordinators at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Fair Haven Community Health Care, Cornell-Scott Hill Health Center, and, as of this year, Project Access, to work with pregnant women to ensure healthy and successful births.
They refer uninsured women to the city’s Health Department to sign up for HUSKY, the state Medicaid program for children and parents. They help arranged childcare, transportation and translation services. They refer pregnant women and parents to specialists and mental health providers. And they connect women at risk of homelessness with housing services.
Harris said that the new federal grant money requires NHHS to be working with 600 women every year.
And, for the first time in the program’s history, the funds also require NHHS to work with 100 male partners and husbands every year to ensure that they are intimately involved in their partner’s pregnancy and their infant child’s good health.
That new male outreach will include a program called Texting for Dads. According to a NHHS executive summary of grant-funded programs, the program will “provide automated nudges/tips to engage fathers, facilitate supportive and productive partners during pregnancy, after their child’s birth, and with their own health.”
Harris said NHHS should be able to increase its staff by around five people with the new grant funds. The program currently employs four people at its central office on Audubon Street and another five care coordinators out in the field.
“It is a comprehensive approach to maternal and child healthcare,” DeLauro said in praise of NHHS.
She added that, through her leadership on the House Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, the 2019 federal budget allocated $123 million to the 100-plus Healthy Start programs through the country.
President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for 2020, she said, flat funds the Healthy Start program and reduces the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant program by $17 million.