viernes, 12 de junio de 2020

Protecting maternal and child health during an economic crisis: Lessons learned from the Great Recession - BMC Series blog

Protecting maternal and child health during an economic crisis: Lessons learned from the Great Recession - BMC Series blog

Erin Blakeney

Erin Blakeney

Erin Blakeney is a nurse scientist and health services researcher whose work is motivated by the knowledge that all too often our healthcare system does not safely, efficiently, or effectively meet the needs of our population. Dr. Blakeney’s higher education journey started with a Bachelor’s degree major in Politics and Environmental Studies and a minor in Biology at Whitman College. Subsequently, she completed an accelerated second Bachelor’s degree in Nursing from Johns Hopkins University, a Master’s degree in International Education (focusing on cross-cultural exchange and training) from New York University, and finally a PhD in Nursing Science with a concentration in Social Science Statistics from the University of Washington. Reflecting this interdisciplinary background, Dr. Blakeney’s program of research focuses on identifying and implementing models of care that increase access to evidence-based care, improve safety, reduce disparities, and empower patients and health care teams to achieve better care and outcomes.


Protecting maternal and child health during an economic crisis: Lessons learned from the Great Recession

As the coronavirus pandemic causes global economic slowdowns, looking back to the Great Recession a decade ago can help plan for and mitigate some of the impacts. In this blog post, the author of a series of papers studying maternal and child health disparities during the Great Recession in the U.S., the most recent of which was published last month in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, discusses what was learned about factors associated with greater or lesser disparities.
I am a nurse scientist and health services researcher. I was born and raised in a series of small towns in rural Washington State in the U.S. In September 2009, I returned to the Pacific Northwest to pursue a PhD. It was the height of the Great Recession (2008-2009) and I quickly became concerned that the recession was making it harder for people to access care in the kinds of resource-poor areas similar to where I grew up. I decided to focus my dissertation work on this area and started by carrying out interviews with public health stakeholders around Washington State. Interviews yielded widespread concern about the effects of the recession — particularly among maternal and child health (MCH) populations. Disparities in MCH outcomes like timing of entry to prenatal care (PNC), birth weight (BW), and infant mortality are long-standing and have been documented by race/ethnicity, geography and other social characteristics groupings like education and insurance status.

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