Promising and Proven Strategies for State MCH Partnerships with Academic Colleagues

Sally Fogerty: Thanks, Holly. What I'm going to do is talk a little bit about what it was like being a state rep, but also being part of a representative from AMCHP on that and what it meant to sort of develop this type of partnership and why I think by having this type of partnership we were actually able to come up with a very good document and guide that could be used by states. This was a little different than some of the other efforts in that it was actually an initiative that came out from the national level so that it was not one that came up from the bottom almost from the state cluster group working with the center, but actually the center was approached by MCHB to address the issue. And it was part of their co-operative agreement. The state cluster group was already in place so that when the center was approached, they actually came back to the cluster group and said, "How best do you think we might proceed with this?" And a plan was laid out and actually a larger group was put together that had members from additional states as well as a broad group of practitioners and outside organizations involved. And with that what happened is that the center went back and looked at and sort of established this whole social historical context. They took responsibility for reviewing the literature. And then through multiple meetings, and I guess I have to say that to me one of the most incredible pieces of most of these processes, including Cast Five, is that by working with a center and with an academic institution, they have the ability to go back and do that level of literature review. They have the ability to bring forward multiple ways that you might want to look at a given problem and then bringing it forward there can be a group of those people, those of us actually involved in the practice side of it, whether at the state level or whether it's individual practitioners who can respond to that. What came out of all of this was 13 different papers that were prepared by the Center. Those 13 different papers were actually reviewed by the larger committee that was put together and multiple comments submitted. And as I look around this room I know there are some other MCH directors who've sat through some of these meetings. And in a day and a half meeting, the amount of comments thrown out, the number of ideas that are actually thrown out is almost overwhelming. Somehow, what happens by the Center is they're able to pull all of that together. And by pulling that together and coming up with these 13 different sort of health topics, preparing the papers, they moved forward to really produce 13 different issue briefs. Were there 13 issue briefs? There were, one for each one of those papers. And when you have sort of the 13 papers, they were academic in nature. They were not long, but I have to admit they were papers that I read because I was on the committee. I probably received a lot of these papers on a regular basis and they sort of go in that pile to be read. And I don't know about the rest of you, but my pile is getting very tall. And then at some point you can just kind of move it aside and start your next one. Okay. What we were able to do, working as a team, was to sort of say, "These are really wonderful papers but they may end up in a lot of piles. So is there a way of sort of honing them down and really coming up with issue briefs you can send out on either an individual basis or can be available, which are very crisp documents, which are documents that based on the input they received are useful documents." And I think that we completed this initiative four years ago? Probably? I can honestly tell you that about five months ago I went back to pull out three of those issue briefs and they are still current but because they were issue briefs and not sort of these detailed articles, I actually was able to give them to staff to move forward to put together a whole new area or a whole new initiative around perinatal health. So I think that it's this linkage together, this bringing together the academic side, the actual practitioners who are out there doing the work at the community level and your state level policy makers as well as your national organizations that help in bringing it into something that is actually useful. What came out of this was a book called "Charting a Course for the Future of Women's and Perinatal Health." There actually are two volumes to this document; one being "The Concept Findings and Recommendations and The Reviews of the Issues." It is still, I think, a very current document. I think it represents one of the areas in which we've been very successful in bringing research to practice. An area in which you can take all of these research issues, you can bring them down to the level in which we can begin to think about how do they relate to policy? How might we want to move forward with those? And that really means that not only do you produce the document, but you really think about how it's going to be disseminated. And what is as important as developing the document the using that group and people working together to really think about how do we disseminate this? How do we make it a document which can be used? And what type of support will states need or community groups need in order to utilize the material? And what came out of this particular group was the printed copies--actually this very nice brochure, which actually told you how you could obtain it. And then very short articles, which were printed in various national organization groups, could be available to be in electronic newsletters, which really gave some idea about the multiple topics. And then presentations and workshops, which were given by not just staff at the centers, but were actually given by people involved in the process. What that means is that there have been some spin-offs and other products that have really come from these recommendations. One being looking at state strategies for improving data on women's health and linking into other national groups looking at women, women's health, women's economic status, and putting together some fairly comprehensive documents and then the rethinking of approaches to perinatal health and hopefully to bright futures for women, which is proposed and I believe moving forward and is an effort of the Bureau as we move forward. Again, I guess, I think that what's most important is that we work from sort of our state level to really link in with the academic facilities that we have available. What has been, I think, very rewarding about working with the center at Johns Hopkins has been that they have brought in people from all over the nation. And they have really sought to get the level of input necessary to really make the documents they produced useful to states and to local government. I think many of you have seen many of the documents that we've had and those documents can be used over and over again throughout the multiple years. And I think it's important that we continue to put together those types of relationships and would urge everyone here to reach out to the various academic institutions within your area to really look at how can they work with you to really do that type of detailed research, literature reviews, that at least I don't have time and my staff do not have time to do. Thank you.