In August, a proposed set of Core State Preconception Health Indicators was released for public comment by the Initiative’s Working Group on the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) Web site. The Core State Preconception Health Indicators Initiative Working Group was convened by the Public Health Work Group of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Preconception Health and Healthcare Steering Committee, and is a voluntary collaboration of program and policy leaders and epidemiologists from seven states - California, Delaware, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas and Utah.
Representatives from the seven states worked to develop a final list of 45 Core State Preconception Health and Health Care Indicators within 11 different domains:
- General health
- Social determinants of health
- Health care
- Reproductive and family planning
- Tobacco, alcohol and substance abuse
- Nutrition and physical activity
- Mental health
- Emotional and social support
- Chronic conditions
- Infections
- Genetics and epigenetics
These indicators are meant to allow states to uniformly define, collect, and report on data relevant to the health status of women between the ages of 18 and 44 years. The working group recognizes the set of indicators is not perfect and represents only a starting point. Future efforts will be needed to improve this set of surveillance indicators as more data about the impact of preconception health and health care programs become available. There are currently no nationwide surveillance systems that specifically collect data from reproductive-age women.
Comments were requested by Sept. 4, 2009, but continued to be accepted on the eb site past this date.