North Carolina Healthy Start Eastern, Northeastern, and Triad Baby Love Plus (BLP) : report of program accomplishments to the Health Resources and Services Administration

North Carolina Healthy Start Eastern, Northeastern, and Triad Baby Love Plus (BLP) Report of Program Accomplishments to the Health Resources and Services Administration May 2010 Healthy Start in North Carolina, the Baby Love Plus Initiative, has worked in fourteen of the state’s most disadvantaged counties to: • Reduce racial disparities in birth outcomes and promote healthy pregnancies • Strengthen perinatal systems of care • Build community capacity to address perinatal disparity • Bring scarce dollars to North Carolina communities with the greatest disparities in birth outcomes North Carolina Healthy Start Baby Love Plus Project Counties BLP project counties are primarily rural and isolated in nature, and are characterized by high poverty and unemployment, limited health care options (mainly public clinics), infant mortality rates over 16 per 1,000 for Minorities; (> 3 x White rate), high Medicaid (70-80% of deliveries) usage and high prevalence of co¬ morbidities such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension. The “Plus” in Baby Love Plus supports the State’s Medicaid prenatal case management program called Baby Love. Enhancements offered by BLP include outreach, education and training, transportation, depression screening and referral, and interconceptional case management for high-risk moms. BLP works in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research (Julie DeClerque, PhD, and Ellen Shanahan, MA, evaluation team) who conduct evaluation activities. The program has achieved success in several key outcomes such as disparity reduction in early entry into prenatal care and improvement in the disparity rate between White and Minority birth outcomes. UNC THE CECIL G. SHEPS CENTER FOR HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH