TRENTON, NJ — First lady Tammy Murphy and the New Jersey Department of Health announced Sept. 24 the award of a five-year grant for $2.1 million each year from the Health Resources and Services Administration to advance health equity and address disparities in maternal health outcomes.
“Every mother deserves the opportunity for a healthy birth experience and a healthy child,” Murphy said. “Skin color should not impact the quality of care received or chances of surviving childbirth, nor should it determine whether children live to see their 1st birthday. This grant will go a long way toward addressing disparities in health outcomes and establishing New Jersey as a leader in maternal and infant health. Together, and only together, will we make New Jersey the safest place in the nation to deliver a baby.”
This funding will support the work of the New Jersey Maternity Care Quality Collaborative, a statutorily mandated multidisciplinary team of stakeholders who will oversee the transformation of maternal health care in the state. The collaborative will establish a shared vision and statewide goals for key health services, focused on decreasing maternal deaths, injuries, and racial and ethnic disparities. The grant funding will be used to promote innovative, evidenced-informed strategies for improving maternity care delivery in the state and the elimination of disparities in outcomes for mothers and their babies. The grant will also support maternal mortality and morbidity data collection and analysis with a focus on moving data to action.
“Recognizing the need to address maternal mortality and complications, the Department of Health has been focusing on enhancing data collection, developing strategies for quality improvement, eliminating disparities and identifying best practices to replicate across the state,” acting Department of Health Commissioner Judith M. Persichilli said. “This grant funding will allow the department to further implement this important work to avoid preventable death and injuries to New Jersey’s mothers regardless of their race or ethnicity, economic status or insurance coverage.”
The department will undertake several activities to drive innovation in maternity care delivery, including implicit bias training; promoting access to long-acting reversible contraceptives during the postpartum period; fostering collaborative learning for providers such as OB/GYNs, community health workers and doulas; and ensuring connectivity to risk assessment screening tools.
The Department was also recently awarded $450,000 in federal funding to improve timeliness and accuracy of case review and determination conducted by the New Jersey Maternal Mortality Review Committee.
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