Introduction and Welcome

DR. PETER VAN DYCK: Good morning. Sally? Welcome. Michelle. Pardon me? Oh, no. Michelle, Dr. Sanchez, thank you for being here. I, really good to see so many of you here. So many old friends. Maybe I should say so many friends, not so many old friends, so many long-time friends and co-workers. While attending a convention three psychiatrists decide to take a walk. “You know, people are always coming to us as psychiatrists,” they said. “And telling us and sharing with us their guilts or their fears, but we don’t have anybody to go to for our problems. Wouldn’t it be kind of wonderful, you know we’re all professionals, the three of us are all professionals. Why don’t we hear each other out right now, and we’ll share with us our greatest fear or guilts. So they agreed that this was a good idea. So on this little ritual, the first psychiatrist confesses to the other two, “I’m a compulsive shopper, deeply in debt, so I over bill my patients as often as I can.” Well, the second tells his story. He admits, “I have a drug problem that’s out of control and I frequently pressure my patients into buying illegal drugs for me.” Well, so the third psychiatrist says, “I really know what’s wrong, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t keep a secret.” I can’t keep a secret, either, and my secret is that I get to work with such wonderful people every day. I would like the people here from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau to stand. Come on, stand up, because I want you to see the wonderful people I get to work with every day. Come on. Okay. So you get a chance to see and I often get to speak in front of you and talk about the wonderful things the Bureau is doing, but a meeting like this, we all get to share. You get to hear from them, and that’s really the strength of this meeting, and we value our partnership with you and the states and as state directors, and that’s the wonderful part of this meeting is being able to share and work together. I have a couple extra minutes because Betty Duke is unable to come this morning. She had a meeting scheduled late Friday and couldn’t come this morning. So I have a couple extra minutes, and I’m really proud of our strategic plan. Our new strategic plan, so I thought I’d take a minute and just highlight a couple areas within that strategic plan. Some of you who were here yesterday have a copy. Others of you don’t. We will send one to you because we’re proud of it and we do make decisions from this strategic plan. And just bear with me here for a couple of minutes. We have a mission statement. And that mission says that the Maternal and Child Health Bureau is to provide national leadership in partnership with key stakeholders to improve the physical and mental health, the safety and well-being of Maternal and Child Health population, which includes all of the nation’s women, infants, children, adolescents, and their families, including fathers and children with special health care needs. The reason I’m highlighting this plan is because I think there’s a lot of information that would be valuable for you and valuable in your plan. We have five goals: To provide national leadership for maternal and child health, the promote an environment that supports maternal and child health, to eliminate health disparities and barriers, to improve the health infrastructure and systems of care, and fifth, is to insure quality of care. And for each of those goals, our key strategies, three, four, five key strategies that we feel are important, just to give you an idea for goal one. Provide national leadership for maternal and child health. The key strategies. Create a shared vision and goals for MCH. Strengthen the MCH knowledge base and support scholarship within the MCH community. Forge strong, collaborative, sustainable MCH partnerships, both within and beyond the health sector. To promote family leadership in MCH service delivery, evaluation and program policy development, and provide both graduate level and continuing education training to assure inter-disciplinary MCH public health leadership nationwide. So those are the strategies for goal one. There are similar strategies for each goal. Then further into the document, each of those goals followed by each of the key strategies, then has the attachment of the performance measures that relate to each of those key strategies. And that includes the 18 national performance measures, which you’re familiar with, but it also includes the 30 or so that have been developed for all of our (inaudible) and CISS, and Healthy Start, and EMSC programs as well, and which you will be having a chance to have shared with you as you answered some of our guidances. And so performance measures related to creating a shared vision and goals for MCH. One of the key strategies happened to be two performance measures, the percent of MCHB-sponsored programs that are satisfied with the leadership of and services received from MCHB. We have a baseline and we have a target. Our baseline is 73%, 2007 target, 80%. And each of the key strategies has a set of performance measures. These might be useful to you. They certainly guide how we write RFPs, they guide our budget decisions, they guide our future programmatic efforts, and they certainly form a basis for us sharing with you where we’re going and invite your feedback, and this plan is labeled “draft.” There are other important pieces here, but I want to end on one other piece, and that is the MCHB vision. Sally touched on it a bit. Despite budget cuts, despite hard times in some states, despite budget cuts in some programs at the federal level, reorganizations that try to often try to reorganize you out of a job or out of a complete MCH unit, we don’t want to lose the vision. We want to keep our eye on the prize. And I think these few statements about the MCH vision, we need to think about and keep foremost in our thoughts. All children are wanted, nurtured, and provided the assistance they need to mature into healthy, productive adults. Women’s health, safety and well-being throughout the lifecycle are a priority. Families and individuals, young and old alike, are engaged in health-promoting activities that are supported at the community level. The right to achieve one’s full potential is universally assured through attention to the comprehensive physical, biological, intellectual, emotional, and social needs of the MCH population. There is equal access to all for comprehensive quality health care provided in a supportive, culturally competent environment, which is family-centered and community-based. All women and children, especially children with special health care needs are linked to a comprehensive community-based service system through a medical home. Health disparities by racial, ethnic, geographic, or economic status have been eliminated. Maternal and Child Health and public health agencies exemplify the highest standards of excellence, building systems of care grounded in the best available knowledge, developing essential public health capacities and competencies in the service of the MCH population, employing a highly-qualified diverse work force, and providing a respectful and supportive work environment. Society recognizes and fully supports the important role that public health plays in promoting the health of the MCH population, including building, strengthening, and assuring MCH health services and the infrastructure at all levels. I think it’s important for us, and I’m proud of this document, and I’m proud of the support we’ve had from you and our staff in developing it. That we really have created a document that‘s both an accountability document and a vision document and try to marry the two together in some logical, logical way. Jim Whitaker was the first American to climb Everest. In 1963, and for his 40^th anniversary of climbing Everest, he’s 74 years old now, and he’s going back to Everest base camp as a reunion with some other good climbers and look up at the peak that he first climbed 40 years ago. He had a recent visit in Salt Lake City in a speaking engagement, which was attended by some of the greatest climbers in the world, where he showed slides from more than 40 years, four decades, of mountain climbing. But what left the crow nodding in agreement with his talk was his quoting John Muir on the rewards to be found only at altitude, or at high altitude where the air is a little thinner. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. I’ve had the pleasure of being at high altitude for two high altitude treks in the Himalayas, one in Nepal, and one in Bhutan and some of the older of you in the room have heard me speak about those in the past. So I have some experience with high altitude, but coming back, being committed to helping others, feeling the compassion that all of you feel in carrying out your job and in your positions and your feeling of commitment to others is also a little like being at high altitude. And I hope you get a bit of a rush from it. Let the success, the successes blow their freshness into you, and let the challenges gain energy. Use their energy. I applaud you for all your good works. I look forward to a good meeting. Thank you for being here. Thank you very much.