Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital - Center for Healthy Beginnings

What is it?

At Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital, the Center for Healthy Beginnings provides a wide range of assistance designed to meet the community’s need for healthy family services. Healthy Beginnings patients benefit from the advocacy of a certified patient navigator, who is also a trained financial counselor. To meet the needs of the community’s various populations, the navigator is also a certified interpreter, speaking Cape Verdean Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Healthy Beginnings program is designed to engage patients in their health care, providing a deeper understanding of every aspect of care before, during and after pregnancy. The program’s design ensures that the benefit of its services do not end with pregnancy, but offers a continuum of care for baby and mom. The program focuses on educating patients on the importance of prenatal care, screenings, childbirth and lactation classes, infant CPR and counseling. Services offered by Healthy Beginnings include, but are not limited to:

• Financial counseling
  
• Insurance registration
  
• Walk-in pregnancy testing
  
• Prenatal/postpartum care
  
• Patient education
  
• Referrals to community agencies
  
• Establishment with a pediatrician before delivery
  
• On-site interpretation in Cape Verdean Creole, Portuguese and Spanish

An advocate for Healthy Beginnings patients, the navigator reaches out to the community to link patients with other organizations that provide additional services they needed. For example, patients may be referred to the police department to receive a car seat and instruction for proper installation.

Who is it for?

The program serves Brockton-area women and infants. Women are referred to the Center for Healthy Beginnings by the community’s doctors, pediatricians and other community service organizations and agencies. Upon launching Healthy Beginnings in May 2011, the hospital’s community liaison introduced the patient navigator to a network of community contacts. The navigator participates in local health fairs and has prepared “first-person” synopses of the program, which have been published in various community papers, such as the Portuguese paper and in parenting magazines.

Why do they do it?

A 1996 report showed that Brockton had the second highest infant morbidity and mortality rate in the state. After investigating the problem, Brockton Hospital found that ethnic and cultural barriers were keeping women away from the hospital. To overcome these barriers, Brockton developed a Better Beginnings Program, taking prenatal services outside the hospital, directly to the women who needed the services most. The program enrolled about 5,000 women and delivered 3,200 babies. Financial constraints forced the hospital to refocus the Better Beginnings program in 2010. Renamed Healthy Beginnings, the program is focused on providing health care services, networking closely with other community organizations to meet the broader spectrum of patients’ needs.

Impact

Since May 2011, Healthy Beginnings has seen the following impact:

• 104 deliveries, 74 percent of which received prenatal care beginning in the first trimester
  
• 78 percent of the deliveries with nine or more prenatal visits, meeting state standards for adequate prenatal care
  
• All deliveries at Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital with the exception of two, which were delivered at Tufts Medical Center for medical reasons
  
• As of March 2012, 130 patients enrolled in Healthy Beginnings who have not yet delivered
  
• 96 percent of Healthy Beginnings patients who are members of Mass Health Insurance

Contact: Rachel Labas
Media and Public Relations Coordinator
Signature Healthcare
Telephone: 508-941-7657
E-mail: rlabas@signature-healthcare.org