How do maternal health factor trends inform programming?
In the 2016-2017 program year, Geminus Head Start was funded for 12 slots to serve pregnant women across the two counties they serve. The next year, they received additional funding to boost their slots up to 20 pregnant women at a time. Geminus uses data on, among other things, maternal health trends in their service area in order to inform programming decisions. This information includes trend data on factors like low birth weight, preterm births, and smoking.
Geminus partnered with Transform Consulting Group (TCG) to help complete their Five-Year Community Needs Assessment and Annual Update reports to inform their programming for pregnant women. Based on the results, shown above, Geminus determined that these maternal health factors showed fluctuations, but overall no significant changes.
Analysis
Maternal health factors are included as an area to report on in the Health and Social Service Needs of Eligible Families section of the Community Assessment Matrix. Since Geminus serves pregnant women, and has a focus on the prenatal program, we chose to highlight this information in the assessment.
The maternal health data was sourced from Indiana State Department of Health, Division of Maternal and Child Health, County Profiles for Lake and Porter counties, and was graphed using Tableau.
Result
Geminus Head Start is continuing to build up their prenatal program by informing staff and community about the program, serving more mothers, and improving data tracking to measure outcomes.
Additional details:
Audience: Leadership, Direct Staff, Board/PC
Level of Analysis: Grantee
Difficulty: Basic
Content Area: ERSEA, Health, Pregnant Women
Data Source: Tableau, Microsoft Excel
Considerations/Caveats: Geminus will continue to look at the trends of maternal health factors, including and beyond what is currently included in the assessment. Look at internal program data to measure the impacts of direct service from the prenatal program.
Technical Appendix
The data for the Needs Assessment was pulled and collected by TCG. Program information that was not available from the Program Information Reports (PIR), was provided by Geminus Head Start staff. Maternal health data was sourced from Indiana State Department of Health, Division of Maternal and Child Health, County Profiles for Lake and Porter counties. TCG used Tableau Desktop to analyze data and generate charts in the report.
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