Recognizing Black Maternal Health Week
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 700 women die each year in the United States because of pregnancy or delivery complications. In 2020, Black women were by far the most disproportionately affected with a mortality rate of 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 19.1 deaths per 100,000 live births, and 18.2 deaths per 100,000 live births for White and Hispanic women, respectively.
Black women in the U.S. are more likely to die from pregnancy related complications. The team at CHRISTUS Children’s trains other medical teams around the state to help them be prepared for emergencies during labor and delivery.
We hope you will join us as we celebrate the fifth anniversary of Black Maternal Health Week and the movement to change the state of black maternal health. Founded and led by the Black Mamas Matter Alliance is an exciting week of activism, awareness, and community-building.
At CHRISTUS Children's, we emphasize innovative programs to make sure our Black patients have a safe and healthy pregnancy, delivery and postpartum recovery. It starts with education and the team at CHRISTUS Children's is taking the lead to train hospitals across Texas through hands-on simulation programs where our physicians, nurses and the entire care team can practice for critical obstetric emergencies together on their own labor and delivery units. In collaboration with the Texas Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM) initiative we have helped to train hospitals across all of Texas on how to run simulation drills on their units.
These learning sessions pair the multi-disciplinary improvement teams from each participating hospital and expert faculty to exchange ideas about challenges facing our black mothers. The learning sessions include time for each hospital’s team to work together to integrate learning and plan for how to immediately incorporate simulation into their improvement processes.
Currently, 98% of the medical staff at CHRISTUS Children's and 100% of the nursing staff have participated in both a post-partum hemorrhage and a hypertension emergency simulation. This has greatly decreased the team’s reaction time and increased the team’s performance in responding to these emergencies. Through conducting debriefs after actual events, the staff works to continuously improve and decrease the number of severe morbidity and mortality events.
To learn more about how the simulation program is improving maternal outcomes for our moms, please see: https://www.aha.org/system/files/media/file/2022/03/members-in-action-childrens-hospital-of-san-antonio-case-study.pdf