2011 AMCHP and Family Voices National Conference ... - HRSA

2011 AMCHP and Family Voices National Conference: Welcome Plenary and
MacQueen Memorial Lecture
02/13/2011 Omni Shoreham, Washington, D.C.
that time was something called drug babies. And we knew that the fiscal
impact on California was that in order to take care of a baby during the
first 90 days of its life that was born would really impacted by substance
abuse was $300,000 and that was just the beginning. And so we with
understood also from a public health perspective that you can't put money
in public health if all the money is going into the pot to take care of the
bleeding bodies because that's what's in your face. And so we were
looking at that time at all of these babies that were being born that had to
be taken care of and the dwindling public health that we had. We were
looking at the number of public health nurses that one day we looked up
and they weren't there. One day we looked up and 28% of our public
health nurses were gone. They had always been the foot soldiers in the
community. The ones who knew what was going on and could connect
people to the resources that public health had to offer. And so I'm
ashamed to admit this but I really started the birthing project to try to do
something about the fiscal problems that California was having as a result
of all these babies being born. I would like to say that I started the
birthing project because I was mother Theresa and I was just out gathering
the sick and bringing them into shelter or whatever. I was really looking
at what we were going to do to reduce the impact of so many babies born
that needed so much expensive medical attention. And what I decided to
do was to actually use community volunteers as foot soldiers to our public
health officials so that we would have people who were available to pretty
much make sure the high risk and high-cost women would be connected to
whatever resources the State of California had to offer. And because
Peter's shop was the kind of shop where we could really go out and do
what we thought needed to be done and he would back us up, it had to be
something that was realistic because he was going to back us up, I didn't
want to just go to him with words and say I think I have a good idea. I