On Tuesday, Feb. 5, the Association of Teachers of Maternal and Child Health (ATMCH) convened representatives from some of the nation’s essential MCH organizations to develop viable collaborative strategies to address key MCH priority issues. The meeting was held in Tampa, Fla., at the USF Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies.

Meeting attendees were from ATMCH, the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP), the APHA MCH Section, CityMatCH, the Association of Schools of Public Health MCH Council, and the Chiles Center, as well as the HRSA Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the CDC Division of Reproductive Health, and the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

The groups are sharing responsibility to carry out an agreed upon list of priority activities, which include:

·       Developing a national MCH agenda.

·       Collecting and making available MCH stories and anecdotes, for advocacy purposes.

·       Generating and posing MCH-focused questions to presidential candidates.

·       Developing a mechanism to quickly generate evidence-based responses to policy questions.

·       Facilitating MCH work force mentorship of MCH students.

·       Facilitating ability of MCH students to work with state/local MCH agencies.

·       Nominating MCH representatives for the boards of public health accreditation and credentialing organizations such as the Council on Education for Public Health, the Public Health Accreditation Board, and the National Board of Public Health Examiners.

·       Gathering MCH data sets available on one Web page, and developing a way of presenting (mapping, if possible) data sets across the lifespan.

·       Developing an online portal of MCH training resources.

The groups will widely disseminate the resulting products or information as soon as they are available.  Watch this newsletter for more updates in the coming year.