HRSA/MCHB 2005 FEDERAL/STATE PARTNERSHIP MEETING

PUBLIC HEALTH ACROSS THE LIFESPAN

Life Span Approach to Perinatal Women's Health

HOLLY GRASON: As I assume I mentioned I'm from the school publishing health in ballot more and more many years, was lucky to have funding from the Federal Maternal Child Health Bureau to do work in both child and adolescent health and then later women's and perinatal health.

And what we are going to talk about this morning really evolves from some work that started, I guess, well over ten years ago or about ten years ago at this point, we don't date ourselves; but it's an evolving body of work, and we really are inviting your comments and feedback.

My colleague here, Dawn Misra, I'm going to turn the mike over to her in a minute, and she'll tell you some more about how this framework evolved. But she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan now. She was with us at the time we first started working on this, and her son was newborn, I think, at the time.

And she is a perinatal epidemiologist by training. And so since I have no formal public health training and Dawn is probably exemplary in public health academic training, we hope that as a team we sort of exemplify the links between science and practice and academics and public policy, and so this part of what this whole evolving body of work really sort of stems from is a real belief in that and an attempt to really put that rhetoric into practice. So I think you'll see as we can through the talk how we're attempting to do that.

So this framework life course and multiple determinant framework for women's and perinatal health actually started with us trying to think of ways that we could make the argument both for the practice field but for the policy and academic fields why MCH, the traditional MCH, maternal health and women's health really was one and the same thing, and trying to use scientific literature and the theory base in public health to really demonstrate that to our colleagues both in the scientific and the policy and practice fields.

In the early part of this work, which was done around in the late 1990s and early in 2000 and 2001, we had sort of some deadlines and some goals, and we really never got to begin to think about strategies for implementation of the more theoretical work and the empirical underpinnings, you know, getting that together and sort of writing that up and sharing that with folks.

And so over the past few years Dawn and I have worked to try to think about how the framework, how the literature can be used to really inform a strategy framework, and this is why it's so important to us to really get your input, your ideas and feedback.

Today we are going to talk about healthy weight in woman as an example of how we have tried to ‑‑ basically it's a pilot test, if you will, pilot testing how these ideas, the framework might be actually applicable to various kinds of health problems that you all address on a daily basis in your work.

So we're thinking that it's ‑‑ we're hoping that it's applicable to any number of public health problems, but we're going to talk about healthy weight because that's all anyone wants to talk about these days if they are not talking about Medicaid reform or bioterrorism, I suppose.

Lastly, before I turn this over to Dawn, this is not ‑‑ and I think you will see this, as you go through the presentation, so much of our work is informed by what you all do, and so we see this as a body of work that is synthesizing, that is drawing from different fields, and I wanted to acknowledge up front that many of you in the room have been a part of this evolving thinking.

So with that, I'll turn the talk over to Dawn, who will sort of walk us through the scientific basis for the framework and then, true to form, I'll step up and see if I can lead a discussion about strategies.