OUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS
We have learned alongside our Community Partners as they have faced challenges, overcome barriers, and achieved extraordinary successes. Find out more about each project and the outcomes below.
YEAR
2009
GRANT CATEGORY
Health & Well-Being
GRANT AMOUNT
$102,000
Organization:
People's Community Clinic
Project Title:
Healthy Babies Initiative
Project Description:
The People’s Community Clinic (PPC) will use the Impact Austin grant to operate its Healthy Babies Initiative, which will expand PCC’s existing efforts to improve the health of the uninsured and medically underserved children of our community by adding weekly Saturday pediatric clinics, piloting a multi-hour group visit model for children’s well-child checks, and introducing a program geared to increase the number of nursing mothers among their patients. PCC used the well-regarded March of Dimes “Entering Pregnancy” curriculum as the model for their successful group pre-natal visits.
PCC’s success in this implementation provides the basis for the development of this new, innovative program to conduct group well-child checks to an additional 300 infants and children annually.
Grant Status:
Twenty-six Saturday group clinics provided 198 pediatric visits during the Impact Austin grant period. Parents not only learned about their baby and received in depth guidance from professionals, they also developed a support network among the other parents.
While PCC has developed a new model of care with this program of group well-baby visits, they were challenged to find a nurse practitioner to staff Saturday mornings. Saturday sessions were delayed until April 2010 when a pediatrician was hired rather than a nurse practitioner as planned. The resulting increased expense coupled with the staff time and resources required to coordinate and conduct the group visits forced a decrease in the Saturday clinic to bi-monthly clinics rather than weekly as originally planned. While patient visits were 198 rather than the projected 300, the Initiative had a higher than expected patient use rate.
The Healthy Babies Initiative additional goal was to increase the number of mothers who breastfeed their infants. During the Impact Austin grant period, PCC’s Breastfeeding Counselor met with 657 women during pregnancy and post-delivery to educate them on the benefits and fundamentals of breastfeeding and to offer them one-on-one support during the first stages of lactation. Since the start of the lactation program, the percentage of exclusively breastfed babies at two weeks and six months of age has steadily increased.