this Women’s History Month, Let’s focus on Preventative care

By Vanessa Weldon

Women’s History Month is an excellent opportunity to highlight the accomplishments and advocacy of women. It’s also as good a time as any to issue a reminder on the continuing crisis in maternal health, particularly for women of color. I offer this assessment as someone who has spent the past 22 years as a home care nurse.

I work for Montefiore Medical Center, which is in the Bronx. I am also NYSNA’s chair for the Montefiore home care division. By way of background, you must know that the Bronx has some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. We rank dead last in health of any county in New York State 62 out of 62. That is problematic for maternal health.

uniquely Vulnerable

Broadly speaking, across the nation, women of color are 3 times more likely to die than white women due to maternal complications. The Bronx has the highest infant mortality rate in New York

City. And for years, Montefiore home care nurses have served this vulnerable population.

But within the last three years, Montefiore has phased out its maternal health home care program. When we were able to visit new mothers in their homes, we could catch preeclampsia, postpartum depression, and identify a myriad of postpartum complications and social issues. During these visits we could also offer wound care treatment and teach new moms how to breastfeed.

Preventative Care Is key

Although NYSNA succeeded in saving the Montefiore Nurse Family Partnership program, a critical lifeline for vulnerable mothers and babies, our work is far from over. NYSNA negotiated to have the program extended for another year, but the fight now is to get it extended indefinitely. We must continue to fight for preventative health programs, given that women of color continue to die at alarming rates from health conditions that could be avoided if caught early.

Without preventative care, new mothers are more likely to end up in the emergency room, have stokes or suffer other serious conditions that could have been avoided if they had preventative care.

We must continue to ensure that all hospitals put patients before profits. That means investing in home critical care services including infusion care, care for end-stage heart failure patients and maternal care. It also means hiring and retaining nurses.

Access to care in the most vulnerable communities is only one small but important part of reducing systematic racism in healthacre. Organized nurses and healthcare workers must also push for hospitals and regulators to meet racial equity benchmarks. To address maternal health and health equity, hospitals must see beyond dollars, and put patients first.