MCHB ALL GRANTEE MEETING

Divisions and Offices

October 4-7, 2004

DR. VAN DYCK: Thank you Cassie, Dr. Williams, Dennis if I may. Well, let me be the second or the third to welcome you, all of the grantees that are here today it’s overwhelming to see so many of you sitting a room from across America and all our territories. And this is the first ever all grantee meeting that any of us can recall, despite the fact I may have surveyed all of the last century, it is only the first one I recall. The other thing is Cassie introduce you to the stress relievers; I’ll know it’s time to stop my talk when I start seeing all the squeezing going on. So please keep your squeezing to yourself. Two MCH partners this meeting is about partners, rent a rowboat, go fishing in a lake, bonding experience like we are going to have over the next couple of days. Wow, successful fish after fish pulling in the boat, by the end of the afternoon they have twenty-four, thirty fish whatever the limit is between the two of them. I said “boy this is a good deal, we ought to come here tomorrow”, so the one MCH partner says, “God, that is a wonderful idea” he had a piece of chalk in his pocket, and he marked the bottom of the boat, the bottom of the boat so he’d know where they were when they came the next day. And his friend said “oh, this has to be a partnership lets figure this out together, we won’t know we are going to get the same boat tomorrow, that won’t work”.

Why don’t we have the MCH folks stand up, the MCH bureau folks stand up, just so you can get an idea who they are and let’s give them all a hand, come on folks stand up, scattered all around, a great group of people to work with, and please get to know them during this meeting.

Our meeting today is entitled the power of partnership, meeting today’s MCH challenges through partnership and we have three goals. And these goals are to communicate a shared vision and to present new and critical information relevant to performance measurement, policy, program and administrative changes. Second goal, to generate MCH partners through increase awareness and to provide opportunities for working together that compliment and build upon partner activities within as well as across a broader way of programs. And third, to identify critical issues facing the MCH population and opportunities for collaborative effort that can move effectively to meet the needs of the MCH population.

So how are we going to accomplish these meeting goals? Well over the next several days we’ll have some wonderful speakers, we’ll have good panels, exhibits, and a resource room to assist you with performance measures and grant questions and other critical issues. And I want to show you something now on the slides, you guys are great, you’re really something, I’ve been impressed, let me show you a couple of things. This is the result of an MCHB customer satisfaction survey; there is a University who provides the federal government with independent review of its grantees. And how successful they think, how successful the public feels those grantees have been. We did this survey, we didn’t the university did this survey and does it for many federal agencies. They’ve just completed it for us for this last year. So we contracted for a customer satisfaction survey of the end units of your grants, and we clearly chose a sample. It was limited to recipients of direct and enabling services and it was both bought grant-founded activities and discretionary grant founded activities.

For the state grantee projects, the overall score was ninety-one, and you can see the individual scores for environment which included clinic waiting time, how friendly were staff and employees, what did the parents or clients think was the quality of services and how good was the information received. Rather its public education or clinical information, score of ninety-one. If we look at the sample of discretionary grant grantees, the non state grantees, they scored a ninety-one also, environment, including waiting time was eighty-nine, these scores are slightly different, but clearly in the same range as you can see. Now, this bears more importance when we look at the average federal scores in 2003 of all federal agencies they’re average was seventy-one, ours was ninety-one, this shows great grantee empathy and talent and commitment and care for your grantees, this is not something of a bureau did this is something that you’ve done.

We’ll be sending out the scores to those of you who participated there in much more detail and Jack Tenenbaum in our office of data and program development is here at the meeting if you want more information talk to him sometime, you done good. Also, during the meeting you have the opportunity to partner together to discuss MCH critical issues in three ways, one you’re going to be divided by your state and region, so you get a cross kind of fertilization I guess, among grantees that are geographically together. Then you’ll be divided into grantee meetings on Tuesday afternoon and some extending Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, where you’ll meet as grantees or groups of grantees and some of the groups of grantees will meet with other groups of grantees. And then finally your third way you’ll be assigned one of the six diverse work groups we’ve talked about based on the IOM action areas in the future of public health report and those six areas related to your color codes or public health approach, public health infrastructure, partnerships, accountability evidence based decision making and communication. And then on Wednesday morning you’re going to feed back the results of your deliberations, each of the six groups in kind of a town meeting format.

So, you’ll each have a chance, each of the six groups to feed back their liberations. Dennis Williams who’s the deputy administrator for HRSA and I will be here listening to your deliberations and we’ll interact with you on those findings and will be here to answer any questions as well, and then I’ll end it with a little talk, before we leave. This is a wonderful for me personally, opportunity for me to get to meet many of you, I’ll be here during all the meetings, please come up and say “Hi”, get to know other people around your table and other people at the meeting. Be creative, think broadly, meet new partners, through out the meeting and have fun. Now, we’re also celebrating Child Health Day, October 1st the first Monday of the month, if by presidential proclamation, is Child Health Day. I want to show you just two or three minutes worth of slides, to help us understand, despite we’re going to have speakers talking about this, I thought it was important to show you the reason that we are gathered about Child Health Day. Eat healthy, move more. Obese a term we should not be using for children, over weight is sometimes used synonymous with obese and it’s the preferred term for kids at or above the 95th percentile of being BMI for age. At risk for over weight is the preferred term for children who are close to over weight.

Childhood over weight is a significant problem, if we look progressively from the left two to five year olds, over weight ten point three percent, six to eleven over weight fifteen point eight percent, twelve to nineteen, sixteen point one percent. There’s clearly a progression in age as over weight increases. We’re looking at it another way if we separate males and females under twelve, over twelve, you can see from 1976 to 1980 the basic tripling in the percent of over weight females and males no matter what age. Looking at it another way, these are same data, you can again see in these towers, the tremendous increase over the last twenty years of over weight among kids. The black line, vertical line is the healthy people 2010 target, you can see the rate of child and adolescence over weight in the bars by race, and ethnic category and you can see that all gender and racial areas are over the Healthy People 2000, but we have particular problems in the African-American or Black community, and the Mexican-American community. This is another chart showing it the same way depending on how you like to see these data, clearly there are issues that we need to address and that eating healthy and moving more is a significant thing we need to push. What are the leading causes of over weight in youth, inactivity, seventy-five percent of waking hours for our kids today are spent inactive. Five and a half hours or more, by average each day with electronic media, which clearly contributes to that inactivity.

Prohibitive cost, transportation difficulties and time constraints are leading reason why parents say their children are less involved in organized activities. Inadequate physical activity at schools, there’s just no P.E. anymore, whether it’s Elementary school, Middle school, High school and the decline in percentage of High school students involved in daily P.E. from forty-two to thirty-one percent. This is a slide I particularly like and the next one, because it’s scary to me, I don’t like it because it’s scary, but I like it because it says something to me, if we look at the Healthy People 2010 recommendations for vegetables on the right side of the slide, you can basically see that all races are meeting the overall recommended percent of vegetables in the diet. But that’s not all the story, look at this pie chart; this is what makes up the percent of vegetables that they are meeting. And if we look at kids on the left, fifty percent of the vegetables they are eating are fried potatoes, french-fries.

If we look at adults today the percent that eat French-fried potatoes or fried potatoes is about twenty percent. So our children are growing up eating two and half times more fried potatoes then their parents or other adults that they emulate and this doesn’t bode well for our youth as they age. The economic cost are significant, and you can see that it’s clearly has a tremendous impact. Eat healthy, move more, your kit has wonderful resources in it, all the stuff is on the MCHB website, I’m showing you something here that I think is important. The man’s telling his little kitty cat, “never, never think outside the box”, well I implore you, lets think outside the box, that’s what we need to do, as we think through the meeting how we are going to work together and as we think how we can work on the elements of Child Health Day of eating healthy and moving more. Thank you very much, for coming to the meeting.