New Efforts Focus on Lowering Infant Mortality
Virginia’s infant mortality rate has dropped from 12.9 per 1,000 live births in 1982 to 7.1 per 1,000, ranking it 32nd in the nation. However, with the exception of 2000, Virginia’s rate has been consistently higher than the national average.
Idealized Design of Perinatal Care
Idealized Design of Perinatal Care is an innovation project based on the principles of reliability science and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI’s) model for applying these principles to improve care.1 The project builds upon similar processes developed for other clinical arenas in three previous IHI Idealized Design projects. The Idealized Design model focuses on comprehensive redesign to enable a care system to perform substantially better in the future than the best it can do at… Continue
Premature Births Are Fueling Higher Rates of Infant Mortality in U.S., Report Says
High rates of premature birth are the main reason the United States has higher infant mortality than do many other rich countries, government researchers reported Tuesday in their first detailed analysis of a longstanding problem. In Sweden, for instance, 6.3 percent of births were premature, compared with 12.4 percent in the United States in 2005, the latest year for which international rankings are available. Infant mortality also differed markedly: for every 1,000 births in the United States… Continue
Grandmothers Crusade Seeks Healthy Babie
Dona Dei is a grandmother with a mission: encouraging women to teach their daughters ways to reduce the number of babies who die in Virginia before their first birthday.
Dei plans to spread the word this fall through the Grandmothers Campaign, a project developed by the Virginia Department of Health and AARP Virginia. Its goal: cutting Virginia’s infant mortality rate, the 30th highest in the country, from 7.7 deaths to 7.0 deaths per 1,000 babies per year by the end of 2010. Two years ago, 839 Virginia infants died... Continue