Midwifery Services for Immigrants, Refugees, and Low-Income Persons

Grantee: Neighborcare Health
Timeframe: July 2023 – June 2026 | Amount: $554,526

• Year 1: July 2023 – June 2024. Amount: $155,000
• Year 2: July 2024 – June 2025. Amount: $199,526
• Year 3: July 2025 – June 2026. Amount: $200,000

Neighborcare Health’s Midwifery Program addresses maternal healthcare disparities and the underlying causes by meeting the unique needs of their patient population. Neighborcare provides full-service quality healthcare, addresses patients’ chronic conditions, continually strives to improve health outcomes, and helps patients overcome barriers to care. This care is provided at five Neighborcare clinics located in Seattle’s under-resourced neighborhoods: Columbia City, High Point, Lake City, Meridian, and Rainier Beach. Neighborcare offers extensive care, including naturopathic options, and they provide referrals for any services that the Midwifery Program cannot provide, such as fetal survey ultrasounds, physical therapy, cardiology, neurology, and long-term/high acuity mental health issues. Neighborcare’s midwives deliver at Swedish First Hill, a facility that supports high-risk deliveries.

Perinatal Coordinators (PNCs) are a crucial component of Neighborcare’s patients’ care and are critical to patients’ consistently excellent outcomes, yet their time is not reimbursable by insurance. PNCs serve as patient advocates, navigators, and program coordinators. They also provide an extensive amount of patient education on pregnancy, birth, and post-partum care. Funding from PHPDA ensures Neighborcare can maintain a team of PNCs in the Midwifery Program.

Most of Neighborcare’s team of PNCs come from the communities Neighborcare serves and speak the languages of the people they serve. This provides an important community link, and results in critical word-of-mouth referrals. PNCs help patients overcome their many barriers to care, such as navigating public transportation or needing to make appointments with limited/expensive minutes on their phones. PNCs also track who needs appointments, who missed a midwife or outside referral appointment, and help problem solve to keep patients on track for care. Neighborcare’s PNCs stay updated on available social services, enabling them to make hands-on referrals to food banks, legal help, translation services, and much more. Without this unreimbursed, broad-reaching service provided by the PNCs, many patients would be lost to care completely or have concerning delays in care.

In Year 2, Neighborcare collaborated with its Epic electronic health record (EHR) team to develop a smartphrase tool for PNCs to use during telephone communications. This enhancement allows Neighborcare to more accurately track the full scope of time spent providing care and case coordination outside of the three trimester-specific education appointments. Previously, only completed appointments were tracked, which significantly underrepresented the actual support provided to patients.

To further improve data accuracy, Neighborcare purchased Birth Tracks, a specialized software system designed to track, manage, and report on birth-related outcomes. This platform will enable more comprehensive tracking of patients receiving pregnancy-related care, including those in prenatal and postpartum care, miscarriage management, pregnancy terminations, care transfers, and those lost to follow-up.

ABOUT OUR GRANTEE

Neighborcare Health

Neighborcare Health’s mission is to provide comprehensive healthcare for people with difficulty accessing care; respond with sensitivity to the needs of our culturally diverse patients; and advocate and work with others to improve the overall health status of the communities we serve. Our ultimate goal is 100% access to health care with zero heath disparities.