St. Louis Children’s Hospital, BJC Women’s Center, Nurses for Newborns, and other health providers shared maternal services information services and childcare items.
Mia Turner, a community health worker at Nurses for Newborns, said. “We do a lot of teaching; our nurses do a lot of screenings, taking blood pressure, and make sure [moms] have a medical home.”
Turner, who has been with the organization for 17 years. Once a client, she now does home visits where topics including nutrition and safe sleep are discussed.
"I make sure they are connected to agency resources to have a medical home. I talk about safety, we talk about child abuse, neglect, and prevention,” she said.
Taylor Jarrett, a nurse at the BJC Women’s and Infants Center, said her personal goal for the event was to connect with as many expecting moms and their families as possible.
“We just want everybody around to know that this is going on, just because we have so many different booths that have so many resources and, BJC offers services to everywhere in the community,” Jarrett said.
“It’s nice to bring everybody together, especially because we have so many vendors here that are like here to give out education resources. I'm glad we're all coming together.”
Mia Malcolm, manager of the Patient and Family Centered Care program at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, attended the event to educate families on this program that focuses on doing what’s suitable for kids and their families.
”We support families that are inside and outside of the hospital in different ways, mainly our program family partners,” Malcolm said. “We are all parents or guardians of kids who have been in the hospital before, so we just approach it from that way of, ‘I understand what you're going through, let me give you some pro tips, or here's some resources.’”
Malcolm also talked about how she connects families with resources inside and outside the hospital with their community program at Children’s Hospital.
“We are just here to support and show love to the mamas,” she said. “I work a lot in our neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), so sometimes I have to see the little babies when they come in or babies come in and they're sick, so we do anything that we can to show the community that it's not just within those four walls but that we're here regardless.”
This program has been at Children’s Hospital since 1999, which makes it one of the oldest patient-centered care programs in the nation. According to their website, the program aims to build trust within the communities they serve and reduce healthcare disparities.
“Wherever you need us, we're going to show up,” she said. “That is kind of why we wanted to come and I just love mamas, so we just came to support today; if they need us, we're here, but we hope they never have to come see us because nobody wants a sick kiddo, but our program does what's right for families while the doctors and clinicians do what's right for the kids.”