Communities Transforming Maternal & Child Health
Improve maternity care practices and integrate the community’s voice into quality improvement planning to ensure all families experience better birth and breastfeeding outcomes.
Check out tips you can use todayEvidence-based maternity care practices that are intended to improve patient safety and care are not experienced by all families. Birth and breastfeeding outcomes suffer. Racial disparities prevail.
Worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, birthing center leaders and staff are stretched thin by their regular workload. They have little time left over to devote to improving implementation of evidence-based care.
Quality improvement plans are often designed without input from community leaders or members. The programming created doesn’t resonate with the community, and isn’t effective for those that need it most.
2 out of 3 birthing centers don’t have a dedicated quality improvement task force.
Those that do have a task force rarely integrate community leaders or members.1
Community leaders and members understand the unique strengths, challenges, and needs of their community best. Through this focus area, Coffective supports states and communities in ensuring evidence-based maternity care practices lead to better health outcomes for all families by integrating community voice into quality improvement efforts.
Birthing center leaders can increase their knowledge, skill, and capacity for quality improvement work.
Expand opportunities for communities to have a voice in the care they receive.
Improve breastfeeding initiation and exclusivity rates within the birthing center.
Work to eliminate racial disparities in birth and breastfeeding outcomes.
There are many ways to ensure maternity care improves the health of all families. Coffective supports states and communities in choosing solutions — bundled tools, training, and activities — for reaching this goal based on shared priorities and communities’ needs.
Birthing center leaders get support and resources to:
Birthing center leaders can share with and learn from:
Making changes that will lead to better health outcomes for all families requires capturing a complete data story.
Quality improvement tools are provided to help measure and evaluate families’ birth experiences and delivery of maternity care practices. All data is stratified by race to expose disparities.
Anatomy of a QI Task Force is a short video designed to help birthing center leaders start or improve their quality improvement task force. The video reviews the importance of a strong task force, who should participate and how to engage them, as well as ideas for what to discuss at meetings.
Download Anatomy of a QI Task Force
A multi-disciplinary task force can improve safety and outcomes efficiently buy sharing the workload. The Take Force Toolkit provides a step-by-step plan for integrating community partners — like WIC and home visiting programs — into a new or existing task force.
Download the Task Force Toolkit
“Quick Wins” are small, easy actions for improving maternity care outcomes. The QI Implementation Guide makes doing quality improvement work easy and approachable by guiding birthing centers through projects of all sizes, starting with ideas for Quick Wins.
Download the QI Implementation GuideCoffective is working with these states on improving patient health outcomes through community-informed quality improvement. Strategies within this focus area were chosen based on shared goals and communities’ needs.
Coffective Hospital Leader Survey, 2018 & 2019
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