Oregon has recently become the first state in the US to offer free nurse visits to new mothers and fathers statewide.
No one can deny that the United States and its citizens have an array of problems and are facing major challenges, but one which isn’t well reported on is the high rates of death among infants and new mothers compared to other high-income countries.
Oregon’s home visit program called Family Connects is based on a successful model deployed in Durham, North Carolina, and involves a nurse visiting the home of a mother who has just given birth, whether to her first child or her fifth, up to three times in the first month.
Family Connects is an opt-in program that comes at no cost to the family, and the nurse is empowered to ‘connect’ the family with any additional service they may need, whether that’s counseling, psychiatric care, financial assistance, or even, as NPR reports, a hearing aid for a grandparent who’s looking after the child.
State Senator Dr. Elizabeth Steiner championed the program. A family physician, Dr. Steiner wasn’t in charge of creating it or setting policy, but advocated for it in the government. She remembers developing severe post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter, and thought that if one of the Family Connects nurses had visited her, it would have been an enormous help.
To wit, a study of Family Connects mothers found that those who availed themselves of a nurse visit were 30% less likely to develop post-partum anxiety or depression. Undoubtedly one reason for this is the opportunity for the new parents to ask the nurse anything they want.
Additionally, the program’s early data witnessed a reduction in Child Protective Services interventions and investigations among families who had nurses visit them during the first few weeks of life.
The reasons behind these improvements are simple: “Babies are just hard,” Dr. Steiner told NPR.
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One of the nurses in the Oregon state program, Barb Ibrahim, has to drive sometimes as long as 30 to 40 minutes to visit new parents: exactly the reason that Dr. Steiner believed the program was best suited to the state government, as there are many people who live far from any major medical centers.
This isn’t a problem limited to Oregon, where so much of the eastern reaches of the state are very rural. Zero to Three, an early childhood advocacy group, estimates that just 3% of the nation’s babies are in range of existing home visiting programs.
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This question of distance is also partially why the program’s initial cost estimates have long been exceeded. But, if there was ever a reason to overpay it would be for the security and support for the next generation of mothers—and the next generation of Americans.
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