Tag: infant mortality

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UTHSC Receives $2.6 Million Grant Renewal to Serve Underserved Communities

Photo Credit: UTHSC via Facebook

The University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s College of Nursing recently announced a $2.6 million grant renewal that will serve “rural and underserved communities.” This is a renewal of a federal grant that was initially awarded in 2019.

According to the university, the Advanced Nursing Education Workforce grant was renewed by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The grant will be awarded to 19 students in the following Doctor of Nursing practice programs:

  • Nurse Midwifery
  • Family Nurse Practitioner
  • Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner

“The goal of the four-year grant is to increase the number of nurse practitioners and certified nurse midwives, to serve underserved populations, increase diversity in the workforce, and train providers to address health equity and social determinants of health,” said the university in a statement.

Information provided by the Tennessee Justice Center (TJC) said “health equity is achieved when every person, regardless of race, income, education, gender, or other demographics, has access to what they need to be as healthy as possible.”

“The goal of health equity is to eliminate health disparities, such as higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, higher rates of chronic conditions, and lower life expectancy, that are prevalent for people of color and are not due to genetic predispositions,” said TJC.

Memphis and Shelby County have historically reported higher than average infant mortality rates. In 2022, the Flyer reported that while the Shelby County Health Department reported a 28 percent decrease from 2019 to 2020, the averages were still higher than the national average.

The grant also has “enhanced relationships with academic practice partners and rural clinics providing student experiences in rural and medically underserved areas; and provided telehealth training and supplies to rural areas.”

The Tennessee Department of Health considers Shelby County to be a partial county medically underserved area (MUA.)

Dr. Sarah Rhoads, a professor at UTHSC who is responsible for submitting the grant, said this funding will help students with tuition, books, fees, and travel to their partnering clinical sites. These sites include Regional One Health in Memphis, Java Medical Group, and Professional Care Services in West Tennessee. Students will also receive training in these clinics.

“The excellent thing about this program is we are going to develop close partnerships with institutions and ideally it will be a win-win for both,” said Rhoads. “We will make an impact on rural communities as well as underserved communities here in Memphis.”

Rhoads also said that, ideally, students who rotate in these rural health clinics and the “medically underserved areas in Memphis,” will work there when they graduate.

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Shelby County Infant Mortality Rate Decreases; Still Higher Than Average

(Credit: Shelby County Health Department/Facebook)

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. 

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Infant Mortality Rate Down But More Work Needed, Says Health Department

In 2005, when a series of Commercial Appeal articles was published, the infant mortality rate (IMR) for Shelby County was 14.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. The county was ranked third-highest in the country and was similar to rates in developing countries.

Those newspaper articles spawned a Tennessee governor’s summit in 2006, which aimed to tackle the issue head-on statewide. Now, 10 years of work by various agencies in Shelby County has resulted in the lowest reported infant mortality rate in 100 years: 9.2 deaths per 1,000 live births.

But it’s still much higher than the national rate of 6.17 per 1,000 live births, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s 2014 World Fact Book data.

Dr. Michelle Taylor, a maternal and child physician for the Shelby County Health Department, said a range of possibilities — sudden infant death syndrome, lack of immunizations — contribute to the high IMR. The rate is usually a “general health and wellness indicator” for communities, Taylor said. As medical knowledge on how to take care of infants increases, infant mortality has decreased over time, particularly over the past 60 years.

“Even though we’ve had a 30 percent reduction in the mortality rate in the last 10 years, we still know there’s a lot of work to do,” Taylor said. “We know there’s a gap between African-American and white infants. We’re trying to change that as well.”

Premature births also contribute to a high IMR. According to the Urban Child Institute, 13 percent of babies born in 2013 were preterm. Of those, 15 percent of black infants were born preterm, compared to 9 percent of white infants.

Low-income families also tend to have an effect on the IMR when there aren’t enough resources in the community, either medically, nutritionally, or economically.

“We know that if you’re under-resourced, your diet may not be as good,” Taylor said. “You may not have as many opportunities for employment. You may struggle to take care of yourself during pregnancy, meaning that you may not get prenatal care as early as you would like.”

On May 7th, during an Infant Mortality Reduction Summit in Memphis, agencies focused on measures that would further lower the rate. The Infant Mortality Reduction Initiative looks at prenatal care access, breastfeeding initiation, and teen birth rate, as well as appropriately spacing out pregnancies to 18 months apart and seeking care within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

“We found our rate was still higher than it needed to be,” Taylor said. “There were several concerned citizen organizations, agencies, and nonprofits that weren’t going to let that stand. With the summit we had a couple of weeks ago, we had people from all walks of life, people who have been engaged in this fight. They’re ready to make that paradigm shift to the next level in working on this issue.”

The health department has launched two technological initiatives: a blog, called the Shelby County Infant Mortality Reduction Initiative, centering on the issue and an iPhone and Android app. The free app, called B4Babylife, is designed to help people remain healthy before, during, and after pregnancy.

“The blog is going to continue the conversation we had on May 7th, and we’ll have local experts, community leaders, and members blog about how to continue to reduce the rate in Shelby County,” Taylor said.

The next step in terms of lowering the IMR isn’t one step, she said, but a collection of steps needed to continue driving the number down. By organizations stepping up collectively, each issue can be tackled one at a time by various groups.

“We have to do it as a community,” Taylor said. “You know, there are not a lot of initiatives that I know of in Shelby County that have lasted 10 years. [This has been] 10 years of work that different groups of people have been trying to maintain and make sure that we continue to pay attention to the issue. That’s a long time for any locality, any group of people, to continue working on a problem.”