Transcript: Healthier Babies, Healthier Moms

Scott D. Berns, MD, MPH
Senior Vice President, Chapter Programs
March of Dimes

Over 500,000 babies are born prematurely of the roughly four million births a year. The risk in the African-American population is 50 percent higher. And the risk of infant mortality is about double that of white babies and if you look at the causes of infant mortality, preterm birth is number one.

Diane Ashton, MD, MPH
Deputy Medical Director
March of Dimes

Preterm babies face several challenges compared to term infants. They are at higher risk of infection. They’re at higher risk of death. They tend to wind up in the neonatal intensive care unit much more often. They have problems with breathing. They have feeding problems. And there can also be long-term outcomes.

Scott Berns

The March of Dimes has been involved with supporting and funding CenteringPregnancy® programs around the country for the last six years or so.

CenteringPregnancy® brings a philosophy of wellness to prenatal care that is really an empowerment of women to get more involved in their care in a group setting. So you’ll have 10 or 12 women that meet regularly with a nurse/midwife, a physician, and they talk as a group.

Nancy DeGennaro
Certified Nurse Midwife

So then as soon as the baby’s head is free, the baby’s head automatically turns to the side all by itself. We don’t have to even touch it.

Scott Berns

It’s a combination of education, assessments that happen, the weight that’s taken, blood pressure, those usual things that happen at traditional prenatal visits, but then it’s the support and the discussion.

Nancy DeGennaro

When she’s actually giving birth, you are going to be so intent on that baby’s head coming out. It’s the most amazing thing.

Scott Berns

The impact is clear: CenteringPregnancy® decreases preterm birth rates among those women.

Nancy DeGennaro

I think it’s exciting that we are able to show that the outcomes are better with the women who participate in the Centering program. It’s things that we know, it’s that they are being educated, that they are not quickly flying through the system, that they are getting the tools that hey need to navigate their pregnancy.

Diane Ashton

We’re looking at eight CenteringPregnancy® programs that are currently underway, to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. We want to conduct focus groups in at least four of the sites, to get more in-depth information from the African-American patients who are attending services there. And then we’d like to be able to create enhancements to the program.

Scott Berns

The funding from the Aetna Foundation is absolutely key because it’s going to allow us to figure out how to do better with this model.

That’s the bottom line is that we want babies to be born healthy.