The Bronx Healthy Start Partnership (BxHSP) is a collaboration led by Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
BxHSP partners include:
- Morris Heights Health Center (MHHC), Section 330 federally qualified health center networks with large school health programs
- Montefiore Medical Center, Group, and School Health Program
Serving Bronx residents for various communities to improve birth outcomes and promote health and wellness.
Click here for program highlights.
With 1.4 million residents, the Bronx is the nation’s poorest urban county. All BxHSP partners currently serve four target community districts (CDs), each of which had an excess of 10 infant deaths per 1,000 live births averaged over 2007-2009 and a total of 49 infant deaths during that period.
- Concourse/Highbridge (CD 4)
- University/Morris Heights (CD 5)
- Fordham (CD 7)
- Pelham Parkway (CD 11)
In 2010, these four CDs had more than a half million residents, 53% women, 31% below the federal poverty level, 19% uninsured, 27% African American, and 59% Hispanic; and a per capita income of $15,526, 15% below the Bronx-wide and less than half the city-wide averages, respectively.
BxHSP will improve women’s health among this population through outreach and enrollment in health insurance coverage under the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA). The program provides navigators to educate and aid the uninsured regarding eligibility, subsidies, and how to sign up through the New York State health insurance exchange website (nystateofhealth.org). Expands existing ACA outreach and education through its federally qualified health centers, coordinates and facilitates access to services, and provides comprehensive individual and community-wide needs assessments.
Serving a minimum of 500 program participants each year, BxHSP's federally qualified health centers:
- Build upon current and past Maternal and Child Health programs to strengthen, coordinate, and integrate women’s clinical preventive services, inter-conception care and reproductive life planning, and high quality, patient-centered medical homes for high-risk women.
- Provide health education programs that support breastfeeding, immunization, safe sleep, family planning, smoking cessation, and prevention of fetal alcohol syndrome.
- Recruit and train community health workers (CHWs) who:
- Conduct maternal and child screening and home visiting with cultural & linguistic appropriateness and trauma-informed care
- Refer families to existing resilience support and therapeutic programs, including Centering Pregnancy, co-located Healthy Steps, Nurse Family Partnership, Healthy Families New York
- Engage and involve fathers in all aspects of family planning and family life
- Promote evidence-based parenting programs
Coordination and Support
The Bronx Community Action Network maximize the collective impact of BxHSP and, conducts a series of community educational and advocacy forums, and assists in developing an inter-agency learning collaborative to establish and adopt “Best Practices” and assure comprehensive quality improvement.
View the Healthy Start CAN Flyer.
The Bronx Neighborhood Health Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYCDOHMH) participates in the Bronx Community Action Network and assists with securing vital statistics and other public health data.
Funding
Bronx Healthy Start Partnership is funded by Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Maternal and Child Health Bureau.