Document text
Building strong foundations By BILL KETTLER Jessica Winkler knew she had something more than garden-variety morning sickness when she realized she was pregnant with her second child. "My pregnancy was awful," Winkler said, cradling 6-week-old Elena. "I couldn't keep fluids down or anything. I was nauseous 24 hours a day." The Eagle Point woman went to the Community Health Center in White City for help. She discovered she had hyperemesis, a pregnancy-related nausea that can cause severe dehydration and weight loss. She spent four days in a hospital to stabilize her digestive system, and made regular visits to the Community Health Center for the duration of her pregnancy. "They helped me right away," she said. "They just took care of me. I came in once a month, and once a week at the end. They talked to me about how I was doing, and they always wanted to know if I was having any problems." Winkler and hundreds of Jackson County mothers had healthy pregnancies through a federally funded program called Healthy Start. Two new federal grants totaling more than $4.5 million will allow the program to serve more families in Jackson County and expand into Douglas and Josephine counties under a new name - "Family Foundations." "We're building on the success of the past four years of Healthy Start," said Peg Crowley, Community Health Center's executive director. Jackson County's original $2.3 million Healthy Start grant ended June 30. The new federal money allows the Community Health Center to continue working with pregnant women in the White City area, and provides money to expand prenatal care offered by Jackson County and La Clinica del Valle, which serves the county's Hispanic residents. "We're going with a construction model," said Viki Barbour, explaining the rationale behind the project's new name. "We're building healthier babies." Barbour, a public health nurse, oversees Jackson County's involvement in an unusual partnership that includes three county health departments, "safety net" clinics in each county and La Clinica del Valle. Each partner will use its share of the federal dollars primarily to reduce infant mortality in the region and decrease the number of low-birth-weight babies. Putting money into prenatal care often avoids more costly bills later on, Crowley said. Neonatal intensive care can cost thousands of dollars per day. Low-birth-weight babies often have disabilities that require expensive help from special-education teachers. Jackson County public-health nurses will visit pregnant women in their homes, just as they did in the Healthy Start program, but there will be nearly twice as many nurses in the field. Right now the county has 5.5 public-health nurse positions. The grant provides funding for an additional 2.5 positions, and the Jackson County commissioners approved funding for two more full-time nurses. The seven health-care organizations who share the grant work are known collectively as the Southern Oregon Health Care Coalition. Crowley said as many as 1,500 women and children in Jackson County will receive better medical care during the grant's four-year term, along with an additional 1,000 women and children in Douglas and Josephine counties. In Jackson County, public-health nurses will work primarily with pregnant Hispanic women and women in west Medford. Data collected during 1996-98 showed disproportionately high rates of infant mortality and low-birth-weight pregnancies among those groups of women. Troubled pregnancies often can be traced to problems such as homelessness, domestic violence or drug and alcohol abuse, said Brenda Johnson, director of La Clinica del Valle. Health-care workers will locate women who seem headed for a difficult pregnancy, encourage them to get regular prenatal care and help them eliminate conditions that could prevent them from delivering a healthy baby. "We'll be helping families create a stable foundation for themselves so they don't need us," Johnson said. The money comes from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Maternal Child Health Bureau under an initiative to eliminate disparities in perinatal (about the time of birth) health. Crowley said at least 210 communities around the United States have levels of infant mortality that would qualify for funding. The "eliminating disparities" program was open to 94 communities that had received Healthy Start funding, but there were just 70 grants available under the new initiative. Crowley said Jackson County's public health agencies would have been hard-pressed to continue their prenatal care programs if they had failed to win renewed funding. "Without the grant, we would have been searching high and low for the dollars we would need to provide that care." The two-grant package includes about $950,000 for "interconceptional care" to encourage women to avoid pregnancy until they are physically and emotionally prepared to conceive. "We'll be able to follow these women until their babies are age 2 and support them and help them learn to be good moms," Crowley said. Crowley said only six interconceptional care grants were awarded across the United States. "When you get one out of six," she said, "you feel like it's a miracle." Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.