MCHB EPI Atlanta Conference
 
December 5 - 7, 2006

MCH Epidemiology: Mapping the Future

BAO-PING ZHU: Good afternoon. Please be seated. I know it’s hard to -- after the excitement at lunch, and also a big lunch, it’s hard to concentrate, but I promise you -- this will be a very interactive, very exciting session. And one of the things -- I know everybody wants to come up here to speak at the plenary session, but we can’t have enough space. We all wanted to come here. This will be your opportunity to talk. And so this session is about MCH Epidemiology: Mapping the Future.

My name is Bao-Ping Zhu. I’m the state epidemiologist. Three years ago -- I was with the MCHEP program for a long time, and three years ago I decided to climb into the backseat. So I don’t get involved directly with state analysis and program evaluations and those kinds of things anymore, but I still work with my staff with the program people to really work in this exciting field. I’ll spend a few minutes -- less than five minutes, so if you -- I promise, I will finish before my time is up.

What is MCH Epidemiology? A few years ago we had a session, a planning session, to talk about MCH Epidemiology. We talked about what is MCH Epidemiology. It was also a memorable session. It was -- a lot a people had good ideas. And then in 1999, (inaudible) had an article that defined MCH Epidemiology. We finally have a definition, which says a systematic analysis and interpretation of population base and programs, specific health and related data in order to assess the distribution and determinants of the health status and needs of the maternal and child population for the purpose of implementing effective interventions and promoting policy developments. As you can see this is very broad, and we just covered just about everything. And I think the only significant thing -- pardon me, (inaudible) is maternal child health. The field has grown a lot. The first MCH Epidemiology was held in 1995. In 1997, it was my first time to join the school when I came to join the ’97 conference. And as you can see, this is the number of abstracts submitted. The previous years, I do not have data. I just -- but (inaudible) for the data. And this is, as you can see, the number of abstracts submitted. If you actually do a fit of statistical model, you can see actually -- every year we have increased about 23 abstract, and the fee value was actually 0.05. And Oscar is 0.69; it’s not bad. And despite the intervention this year, we implemented the registration fee. We didn’t see a lot of decrease in number of abstracts.

So how does our future look like? These are my own MCH population with 75 percent response rate. One person did not -- well, 25 percent of the people did not sign up, did not sign the consent, so I only show three people. And so the answer in the future starts here. And by the way, this is my physical exercise and physical exercise, so positive support as well. This morning we talked about positive support, and this is my positive support and physical exercise as well.

So this session we are going to showcase the best practices. We’re going to have discussion to enrich the perspectives on the growth of MCH Epi, and the diversity of practices in both at the federal level and the local level, and to broaden our understanding of the field, and to stimulate thinking about our future.

This session is not a forum for debate, so we’re not going to debate and then decide who’s right and who’s wrong. And this is not a consensus-building exercise. We’re not going to come out with one consensus, but rather we’re going to try to decide to broaden -- to listen to the partners, and to decide what we’re going to do.

So with that, we have three presentations. I’m not going to do the introduction. We have three great speakers. I assume everybody knows them. If you don’t know them by now, we need to talk. Following that, we’re going to have discussions, so it will be your turn to voice your opinion.