Saving babies means thinking inside the box

Providing door-to-door health care for mothers and children under five years of age greatly reduces mortality. Thanks to a program of home visits by community health care workers funded by the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Yirimadio neighborhood of Mali’s capital city, Bamako, has succeeded in dramatically reducing childhood mortality. The government intends to scale the pilot program into a nationwide campaign by 2022.

New mothers who live in poverty are faced with fewer resources to help them with their physical and mental health as well as the health of their babies. In New York City, the Nurse-Family partnership matches nurses with economically poor first-time mothers. Different studies have shown that women in the program have healthier pregnancies and children.

The local primary health center in Tayi, a new community in Chanchaga Local Government Area of Niger state, has helped normalize the discussion of family planning which includes topics such as primary health care delivery and contraception. The center provides on-site educational opportunities but has also partnered with religious leaders to especially help the conversation reach men.

A doula program in San Francisco is helping to create jobs and build equity in maternal health, especially for Black mothers. Training is free for the client as well as for the doulas, with trainees also receiving mentorship and full benefits. To date, the organization has raised nearly $1 million for operational expenses from a variety of channels including "foundations, a city-managed health plan, and revenue from a local sugary drinks tax."

Health officials and Cleveland homeless shelters are working together to prevent a coronavirus outbreak among those who are experiencing homelessness. Mass testing, separate areas for the already tested and those yet to be, and a focus on more equitably disseminating information have been key to helping the caseload stay low, although the shelters are facing limitations such as a slow turnaround time for test results.

To increase COVID-19 testing in one Dallas neighborhood, community leaders, healthcare professionals, and a local church have joined together to implement a testing site directly in the community. Offering 250 free tests per day, the makeshift clinic helps to address the need of community members who may not feel comfortable going to a medical institution that they do not trust.

To promote better healthcare access in The Bronx, local healthcare providers, activists, and nonprofits are working together to implement tactics such as community conversations or the use of an app that assists pregnant women of color. These methodologies function on the basis of the sharing of "social capital," which helps increase and mobilize interpersonal relationships.

To combat racial disparities in maternal health care, New York is funding a partnership program between the city and communities to improve maternal healthcare for women of color. Both public and private hospitals will implement implicit bias training and the city will work to improve its data collection. Hospitals will also receive funds for health coordinators to make sure women are accessing care.

In remote areas of Kenya, health care is hard to access and medical professionals and technology have been hard to come by. A new partnership between the government, Phillips, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has resulted in a new health care centre with state of the art technology, health care training systems, and more personnel to better serve women and children.

Partnering cops and clinicians has led to a cultural change in New Haven's police department. Their definition of a victim extends past the person with physical injuries in order to help children from violence-stricken households, a more comprehensive approach.