HRSA/MCHB 2005 FEDERAL/STATE PARTNERSHIP MEETING

PUBLIC HEALTH ACROSS THE LIFESPAN

Introduction and Welcome

PETER VAN DYCK: Thank you, Cassie. It is hard to see you, but I’ll know you’re there when you laugh and giggle and smile at hearing the history of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau.

In order to make this presentation a little different this year, I went back and looked at all, well not all, that would have taken too long, but all the presentations I’ve done in the last eight or ten years and went back to the first partnership meeting, which I found a booklet for 1997. So, we’re at least that old in partnership or new leadership meetings every year since 1997. But I decided to go back further than that.

So, enters first in the history of the bureau and then kind of a recent history in the law, I’ve interspersed cartoon slides that I began using in 1970’s, in which you haven’t seen, well certainly the new people have never seen and the old people probably are old enough that they won’t remember from them, and I’ve just also decided since being here and being razzed a little bit, that I’m going to tell a story I told in the 1970’s and I think I’ve told since. So, interspersed with the history of the bureau, that’s a little history of some of the things, I’ve shown over the years, but not in the last ten years, really. At least, not most of them.

I have a backyard and I have bird feeders and I’m interested in birds, and I witnessed a story, at least some activity that lead to a story. It began in the fall. It began by seeing two or three little baby pigeons and a mother pigeon who started on the bird feeders out in the backyard, and I have a camera with a big lens on it to catch the occasional hawk or unusual bird, and binoculars. And this mother was just so dutiful. I mean, maternal and child health people, we should love it. Very devoted, feeding the babies all the time, all the baby all stretching with the little beak up there waiting for their worm or their little piece of a peanut, or something. And I watched this for two or three weeks and began to get quite attached. It was beginning to get cooler, just about this time of year, really. And, other birds had already left to fly south, and the pigeons hadn’t left yet. Um, and they had another couple weeks before it was probably time and I suddenly noticed one day, after two or three weeks of following these little baby birds and watching them grow with the mother and the mother’s attention, that one of them had hurt his or her wing a little bit. And she could fly but she couldn’t fly very well, and it looked like she wouldn’t be able to fly very long. So, she could get up, she could eat, and she was fine, she wasn’t sick, but there must been a little injury that one right wing. So, she’d get on the ground, she could fly up the birdfeeder, fly up to the tree, but it just seemed like she wouldn’t be able to fly a long way. So, I began to wonder what’s going to happen when this little family group has to fly south in the next couple of weeks. Well, the mother became a little more doteful over this little baby. The others were doing fine. The other two were doing fine. And, paid a little extra attention. It almost looked like she was encouraging her to try to fly but, you know, kind of preen her wing once in a while. And all the other birds had left and it was time for them to go, and they hadn’t gone yet, another few days. And I was really beginning to think this mom is just waiting another few days to start her trek with the babies to help his one gain a little more use of that wing because she was worried maybe she couldn’t make the long distance across two or three states. So, finally one day, it happened to be on a weekend so I could really see what was happening, the mom found some string which I had used for an old badminton net and kind of had put an old badminton net together, she pulled some string from that net and somehow had managed to get it around the little baby’s shoulders. You know, inside her head, kind of up under her chin, and she put the other piece of the string in her mouth and, you know, she started flapping her wings and the babies flapped their wings, and this little female flapped her wings and kind of, you could see the string stretch out, and they began to take off. The mother kind of towing this little baby pigeon on this flight to the south. You know, I kind of get a little tear in my eye and I realized I just witnessed or seen the first bird to be pigeon towed.

I told you, I’d know when you’re there. So. Well, I haven’t told that for a while. You can understand why. It’s kind of fun to resurrect the old.

Leadership. The power of partnership. You heard Cassie talk about the partnership meeting. These are called partnership or new leaders meeting. And, you know, I think it is a time, I look at these slides once a year or some of them, and occasionally when I talk about the history of the bureau or the law, specifically, and we really don’t have chance to share what the law is and what the law says, and why we do some of the things we do. So, that’s really what this is about. It’ll be mixed with history of the bureau, mixed with strategic plan that we, is current, mixed with current budget so you understand what the current budget that you’re going to be receiving shortly, and mixed with some other insights about history in the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. But we began these partnership meetings to communicate a shared vision and to present new and critical information relevant to performance measurement and other issues related to working together in partnership towards the same goals that we all aspire to. We want to generate better awareness and to provide opportunities for working together, and we wanted to identify critical issues facing the MCH population and areas that we could collaborate on, again to meet our common goals. We both have the same goals and want to produce the same positive outcome for our mothers and babies. And, one of the ways not to provide partnership, hey, no way. I’ll put my magazine down when you put yours down; that’s probably not the way to advance the partnership. We have a strategic plan. Just to prove it to you, I brought it. It’s dated 2003 to 2007. It’s not in your booklet, I don’t think. It is on the website, and it is something you probably ought to visit periodically, and what I’m going to do is just read a couple things or show you a couple slides from the strategic plan on our mission and our vision and our values and our goals. And, then these are all highlighted in great detail in the strategic plan. But to give us a sense of mission, we think our mission is to provide national leadership and to work in partnership with you folks, and families, to strengthen the MCH infrastructure, assure the availability and use of medical homes, and to build the knowledge and human resources in order to assure continued improvement in the population; in the MCH population. And who is the MCH population? It’s much different, and I find this out all the time as I speak, and when I speak so often.