Community input will be key as the city looks to expand its successful B’more for Healthy Babies initiative to kids and teenagers. This is being done to reduce racially disparate outcomes in health, says new Baltimore City Health Department Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced the planned expansion in her State of the City address on March 9, where she touted the success of B’more for Healthy Babies in reducing Baltimore’s infant mortality rate by 24 percent since 2010.
Noting that the effectiveness of B’more for Healthy Babies was driven in part by collaboration with over 100 partner agencies, Wen says that, “We want to use the same energy and the same concept of working together, to go across the life course, because we know that it’s not enough to just address infant mortality. We also have to make sure that our kids are school ready, to make sure that they’re healthy children, and that they become healthy teens who can continue to learn and then become productive citizens in our city.”
By focusing on the life course of the child through adolescence, B’More for Healthy Kids and B’More for Healthy Teens will seek to take a comprehensive approach to pediatric health, and address a wide array of health disparities including in mental health, oral health, youth violence, asthma, school attendance, vision health, and childhood obesity.
The health department is still in the early stages of developing its strategy for the new initiatives and determining the desired targets for the various areas of health, but community input in this process will be key.
“It’s important for us to engage our communities with designing our intervention and with figuring out our targets as well, and we have not yet completed . . . our community engagement to find out what it is that’s most important to our communities,” said Wen, who did not want to announce specific targets before completing her community engagement.
“We want to do this in a strategic way that fully engages all of our partners, as we’ve done with B’more for Healthy Babies. That’s the reason why B’More for Healthy Babies was so successful, that it fully engaged our communities as equal partners in the process.”
In designing the new initiative, Wen is acutely aware of the role race plays in poor health outcomes in Baltimore City, and says this is something that the new initiatives will be consciously oriented towards addressing.
“One of the main things that helped us address is these (health) injustices in race, because the people who are the most affected by adverse health outcomes are African American, they are people who live in inner cities, they are the poor. And so, everything that we do may increase the health outcomes of rich White kids, frankly, by a little bit, but they will make the most difference to African American, poor city children.”
ralejandro@afro.com