Walking out of a hotel in Rockville, Maryland in the middle of February, the icy blast of morning is a real wake up call.  The mid-year meeting for the Maternal and Child Health Section is less than two weeks away.  Why am I here now and what am I doing?  I am here for a directors’ meeting for a new grant in which I am involved.

Since the APHA Annual Meeting in November, I have had the excitement of putting together a new project for mothers and their children.  The Women’s Wellness and Maternity Center received one of the ASSIST 2010 grants from the Federal Office of Women’s Health to encourage women in the two counties in which I am health officer “to eat better and move more.”  GET WITH IT (Getting East Tennessee Women Involved in Their Health – Interactive Teaching/Training) is getting up and moving, and so are the women in the area.  In this first year, the project focuses on post-partum women – those who have had babies during the past two years, who have a BMI over 27, and who are at an appropriate stage of change.  The target populations are the WIC mothers and other patients at the Maternity Center.  The team of three personal trainers, two health educators, and support staff has already produced a schedule of more than 50 hours of community-based activities and exercise classes.  And the women in the area are really getting with it.  Check things out at www.getwithitwomen.org.

Of course, one must be careful about what one asks for, or in this case writes a grant to fund.  While I have really enjoyed the involvement in this new area of public health, it has been yet another distraction to getting the job done for the MCH Section.  Luckily, Marti Coulter of ATMCH heeded my clarion call by organizing a meeting in Tampa last week for the various MCH groups.  (Gillian Silver has written a report about this session, which appears below.)

The time has clearly come for all of us in MCH to work together to develop a national agenda to clarify the needs of women and their children in a politically astute manner, leading to directed interaction with the presidential candidates.

The mid-year meeting presents another opportunity for the MCH Section to come together and to focus on shared goals.  Planning for the Annual Meeting is only one of the missions of the Section; others include the need to focus on both the organizational and section strategic plans and the need to develop specific measurable objectives for the Section.  These action plans need to transcend the two-year term of the Section chair, and they need to define measurable work for the entire section.  The Intersectional Council has presented us with a framework for an annual work plan that requires such effort.  The people who came to the midy-ear meeting began this process, and more will be done online.   

Improving communication within the Section has made this project achievable.  The infrequency of face to face meetings has always been a major barrier.  The challenge of national advocacy groups, such as APHA, is the need to meet local, state and regional needs while presenting a coherent national set of goals.

The MCH Section has always taken on policy issues of great consequence, such as breastfeeding support, children with special health care needs and access to maternal care services.  As we get closer to the Annual Meeting in San Diego, we must again commit ourselves to setting definable goals and objectives, and clarifying the national agenda for MCH.  The challenges remain great, but the momentum is building.   The message for this newsletter is that the MCH Section not only has to “get with it,” but we also must “stick with it” if our mission is to be successful.

-- Barb Levin