The county’s infant mortality rate decreased by 28 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the Shelby County Health Department (SCHD), though officials could not precisely point to the cause of the drop.
The infant mortality rate is the probability of a newborn dying before reaching the age of one, according to the World Health Organization. Shelby County has historically had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country.
State and county averages here are still higher than the national average. But the new figure is the lowest infant mortality rate in Shelby County since 2009, according to the 2022 Tennessee Child Fatality Annual Report.
SCHD officials said a number of factors contribute to infant mortality such as “physical and mental health of families before, during, and between pregnancies, along with the health education, and resource systems that support those families.”
SCHD spokeswoman Joan Carr said state officials have not yet released statewide vital statics for 2020. So, the health department does not yet have enough information to determine all the factors that have contributed to Shelby County’s infant mortality decrease.
“However, Shelby County Health Department has been making sustained efforts over the past 20-plus years to reduce Shelby County’s historically high infant mortality rates,” Carr said.
Dr. Michelle Taylor, SCHD director, said her department “provides a wide range of programs and resources that directly and indirectly impact infant mortality rates by providing families with support they need to give babies a healthy start in life.” Some of these include TennCare Presumptive Prenatal Program, Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program, and the Community Health Access and Navigation in Tennessee (CHANT) program.
“While we celebrate the recent decrease in infant mortality, it’s important to note that [infant mortality rate] in Shelby County and Tennessee overall remains higher than the national average, and the significant racial disparity between Black infant deaths and white infant deaths have not improved since 2016,” said Taylor. “Black infants in Tennessee are still twice as likely to die before their first birthday than white infants.”
Tennessee’s infant mortality rate exceeds the national rate, which is 6.3 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, according to the state’s child fatality report. However, this is the lowest reported rate for Tennessee over a 20-year period.
In 2020, 495 children in Tennessee did not survive to their first birthday. Shelby County still had the highest infant mortality rate in the state that year with 89 deaths.
