Healthy Families Initiative
Return to All Current Funded Programs
Mothers and Children Benefit from Northern Virginia Initiative
Through our Maternal and Child Health initiative, CareFirst funds community-based efforts to improve maternal, infant and child health in communities where the need is the greatest. To help reduce the infant mortality rate in Northern Virginia, CareFirst donated $392,508 to Northern Virginia Family Service (NVFS) Healthy Families program to provide home-based services to high-risk African-American women who are pregnant or parenting young children to enhance their access to health care and improve their maternal and child health outcomes.
By intervening with African-American women to improve prenatal care, Healthy Families works to improve birth outcomes and thus reduce infant mortality. By continuing to work with these women and their families to promote good parenting skills, outreach workers, specialized in working within the communities served by NVFS, help reduce incidence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and improve the health of children by:
- Encouraging breastfeeding
- Ensuring that children receive needed health care and immunizations
- Helping parents deal with the stresses that lead to child abuse and neglect
In the program’s first year, all of the applicable women had been assigned a health care provider, 21 babies had been delivered at full term weighing more than 2,500 grams, and all participants had completed a positive parenting survey. There were no incidences of low birth weight deliveries for babies in the program – a success that’s remarkable given the expected 9.9 percent incidence rate for the population served by the program.