Starting in 2019 and building on its track record of training and education tools in low-resource countries, Saving Mothers developed a CHW maternal health curriculum for CHWs in NYC.  The Saving Mothers mPOWHER© Program includes the mPOWHER CHW Curriculum© for community health workers and the mPOWHER Kit for their clients. The goals of the program are to improve preparedness of CHWs in NYC by focusing on maternal health literacy, powerful communication skills, and empowerment in a dynamic health, social, cultural and economic environment. The pilot for this program was conducted with a group of CHWs in Brooklyn. Five sessions were presented over a pan of three months with the topics being introduction, communication session 1, anatomy of pregnancy, preeclampsia and nutrition, gestational diabetes (GDM) and communication session 2. 

As an aspiring OBGYN, this organization and its work within the community aligned with the goals I have frequently pondered. Over the past two years, I have worked with Saving Mothers on the NYC mPOWHER Project to help bring it to life and make it available to the community. It has been an excellent opportunity for professional development but has also allowed me to learn so much about the social determinants of health that cannot be taught in a classroom.

Saving Mothers, SM, is a 501(c)(3) maternal health nonprofit dedicated to eradicating preventable maternal deaths and birth-related complications in marginalized communities. Since 2009, their innovative solutions in conjunction with proprietary education, training, and surgical interventions have made a measurable difference. In 2018, SM began tailoring training tools to meet the needs of New York City (NYC) CHWs at the community level but have found the absence of a standardized training for CHWs to be problematic. 

The core belief of Saving Mothers is that reversal of high maternal morbidity and mortality rates in black birthing people should be achieved through a collaborative process to parallel train frontline maternal health workers, mothers and health providers so they can challenge and surmount racism and inequity. Saving Mothers continues to exemplify the changes that can be made when you advance both the health workers (doulas, CHWs) and birthing people’s understanding of basic medical information and hone their communication and advocacy skills the result is a self-sustaining resilience in families and communities.

As a member of the team, I had many projects that I was often involved in. At the beginning of my time with Saving Mothers as a volunteer, I served as an aide in the development of the information cards that the Mom’s Kits contain. As a collaborator on that project, I conducted continuing research on the leading causes of illness and death within the birthing population of NYC so that I could gather information that would be useful to include in the kits. I began collecting short videos on pregnancy, reading articles on ways to better deliver health information and as such, began developing the first versions of the information cards. There were 5 cards created that aligned with what we believed to be important topics that birthing people need to learn more about and be able to understand as they progress throughout their pregnancy. The topics were preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, nutrition, and communication. Once we beta tested the cards, some necessary changes were made and they were put into production last year and placed in kits for distribution. Now the cards are available in English and Mandarin, with a Spanish version to come soon. The cards are being distributed in the mPOWHER Mom’s Kits across NYC.

The other main project that I was involved in was the planning and development of the mPOWHER Community Health Worker Training Program. Before my time at Saving Mothers, the CHW training program was beta tested across the city and focus groups were done to get more insight on what the best method of training would be. Once I became involved in the project, the focus was placed on having a collaborative training program that allows the CHWs to feel involved in their learning. I conducted research on potential session topics, which were presented to the CHWs during the 1st training session. They shared their opinions on what they believed to be important topics to learn more about and together we decided on the topics Communication, Preeclampsia, Gestational Diabetes, Anatomy of Pregnancy and Nutrition. These were specifically designed to complement the topics of the information cards in the Mom’s Kits, as many of the CHWs’ clients would be receiving the kits as well. We created lesson plans and conducted the 5 sessions last Spring with amazing results. I, along with a medical student working at the organization wrote up the results of that pilot program that we hope will be published soon. Currently, the program has been adapted and is on track to be administered by an expanded group of session leaders, including myself, to another class of CHWs in the Bronx within the next few weeks.

A picture of an mPOWHER Kit including information cards I helped to design.

This experience has been quite informative and important to the development of my college career. The opportunities that I have been able to access through my work at Saving Mothers are more than I could have ever dreamed of. I have had the opportunity to work with some incredible people, including the CHWs that participated in the training. I have learnt so much from them, their practice and the stories that they share about what their clients experience. I frequently think about all the negative outcomes within black birthing populations that are preventable and are often due to provider neglect, but the real stories told by real people has had a truly lasting impact on my purview. I even reconsidered becoming a physician because I could not dream of becoming a part of a system that is capable of such injustices. But, if the CHWs and this entire experience has taught me anything, it would be to fight my hardest to become a provider and defy the odds to be the provider that people like me hope to see in those spaces.

Image Credits:

www.savingmothers.org