Representatives for the Goodwill Nurse-Family Partnership speak with a summit attendee on July 23, 2024, during the Labor of Love Summit at the JW Marriott Indianapolis. (Mia Hilkowitz/Indiana Capital Chronicle)
The Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) kicked off its two-day “Labor of Love” Summit on Tuesday with a series of informational sessions addressing women’s health, teen pregnancy and infant wellbeing and outcomes.
At the opening of the summit — which was attended by hundreds of physicians, nurses, caregivers and public health officials — Indiana State Health Commissioner Dr. Lindsay Weaver announced that IDOH would launch a new dashboard on Tuesday to track birth outcomes and infant mortality in the state. The dashboard is available on the IDOH’s website as of Tuesday afternoon.
Weaver said that infant and maternal outcomes are important markers of the greater health of a community. The IDOH partnered with dozens of organizations to host the event, including Riley Children’s Health, the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital, Eskenazi Health and the Indiana Pregnancy Promise Program.
“How we go about our work at the Department of Health, is an acknowledgment that we’re not going to make improvements and continue to get better if we don’t have all our partners,” Weaver told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “It’s really everybody coming together and saying ‘what can we do as a whole to improve?’”
Indiana has implemented several programs in recent years to lower its maternal and infant mortality rates.
Focused conversations
Tuesday marked the 12th anniversary of the summit. Eden Bezy, assistant commissioner and director of the IDOH maternal and child health division, said the agency expanded the event to last two days this year due to past high attendance and demand. This year’s summit also aims to help local health departments implement new solutions.
“We have been working with them to do (maternal child health) related work in their communities so they can learn from the experts and from one another,” Bezy said. “We’re also emphasizing our clinical partners who, again, have a lot of experience in this and want to share what they know with their colleagues around the state.”
The summit includes more than 50 panels and information sessions over two days that address a wide range of maternal and infant health topics. Several of these sessions discussed how medical providers could use trauma and data informed practices to best serve patients from different backgrounds and ages.
One session, for instance, focused on how providers could build trust and relationships with pregnant women in the Haitian Creole community. During this panel, attendees learned about the various cultural and gender norms within this community, and how providers can take these factors into consideration to deliver the best support.
The Haitian Association of Indiana estimates there are over 10,000 Haitians living in Indianapolis.
Other panels addressed how medical and social service providers could help improve outcomes for preterm infants, navigate bereavement and mental health support for patients who lose a pregnancy or infant, and specialized treatments for pregnancy-associated conditions.
“We know that there’s great work happening and that’s where we feel the Department of Health can help,” Weaver said. “By bringing people together so that they can share those great ideas, the programs that are working, the initiatives that they have started, and then seeing the difference and just opening up that opportunity for sharing and learning.”
Latest data on maternal mortality in Indiana
Mary Pell Abernathy, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Union Hospital in Terre Haute, and Cameron Willett, director of the IDOH’s maternal mortality programs, also shared key findings from a recent Indiana Maternal Mortality Review Committee report, which looked at data on pregnancy-related and associated deaths from 2018-2022.
According to the report, there were 72 pregnancy associated deaths in 2022. Of these cases, 55 deaths were associated with, but not directly related to pregnancy, and 12 were directly related. However, five deaths were labeled “pregnancy-associated but unable to determine relatedness.”
Willett said analyzing aggregate data over a five year time-span, rather than looking at a single year of reports, gives public health officials a better idea of the average state of maternal mortality in Indiana.
When looking at the five year aggregate data, Willett said she saw that non-hispanic black women are dying at higher rates in Indiana compared to women of other racial demographics. The data also reflected that most of the reported deaths occurred when a patient was 43 days to one year postpartum, and that more than half of the deaths occurred in urban areas.
“We like to say that just because the care is in a county, doesn’t mean that these women are accessing it,” Willett said. “There may still be barriers to this care that they need.”
The committee found that 80% of pregnancy-associated deaths were preventable—which Willett said showed there are ways to improve outcomes.
Abernathy also shared the committee’s recommendations for local health departments, medical and social service providers, and law enforcement. The recommendations include funding substance use resources and education, identifying at risk-youth, establishing additional training for law enforcement and removing firearms from all households with a history of domestic violence. She also said the state should encourage legislation to increase the number of certified forensic pathologists in Indiana. Because county coroners are elected positions in Indiana, Abernathy said a lack of expertise can impact the quality of information collected.
“The forensic pathologist that helps us on each and every case will sometimes say ‘she had an autopsy, but they failed to look at x’ and that really would have been important for us,” she said. “As our state, if you want to improve the health, not just for women, the health care in our state, we need to have good data to understand that and we need to increase the number of certified coroners.”
Bezy, assistant commissioner and director of the IDOH maternal and child health division, also emphasized the importance of using data in the maternal and infant health field.
“I think it’s important that attendees know the latest data that we’ve been able to share so they can go back and use that data for actionable work in their communities,” Bezy said. “I hope they take away inspiration and ideas from things that are working across the state that they feel like they can implement in their own communities.”
By Mia Hilkowitz — The Indiana Capital Chronicle is an independent, not-for-profit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.
