"Can this nurse/consultant reduce infant mortality?"

[IdaBriggs]

Ask and ye shall receive - I just finished a conversation with someone last week about my "personal" goal to reduce infant mortality in the city of Detroit by 60% within two years - and then this article popped up on my radar! Go, Chicago!


http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130216/ISSUE01/302169978/can-this-nurse-consultant-reduce-infant-mortality

(snip)

Ms. McCarthy, 60, went into consulting in 1980, after earning a master's degree in nursing from Rush University. A decade later, she went into business on her own. Despite her experience and education—she also has an MBA from Loyola University Chicago's Quinlan School of Business—Ms. McCarthy was unable to get a business loan or sign an office lease on her own. Her father, an entrepreneur, gave her a startup loan and signed and guaranteed a lease.

(snip)

This year, Ms. McCarthy will take on a pro bono project: lowering the infant mortality rate in Chicago. At 8.1 per 1,000 live births, it is among the highest in big cities in the country. The rate is 4.9 in both Los Angeles and New York; Washington is worst, at 11.97.

Almost one-quarter of infant deaths in Chicago are sleep-related, and the problem, Ms. McCarthy says bluntly, is huge among poor, black families whose homes have no place for an infant to sleep. “This is wrong,” Ms. McCarthy says. “You have African-American babies dying because they don't have cribs.”

So far, she's enlisted Mount Sinai Hospital in Lawndale, an area plagued by infant deaths; Illinois SIDS, a nonprofit; and Quinlan in the three-year project. Among the goals: finding funds to buy cribs for new parents in high-risk areas and getting high-risk pregnant women to visit doctors more frequently and thus improve prenatal health, which will result in fewer premature births.

[CanSocDem]

1. Noble Enterprise...

Re-distributing wealth shouldn't be that hard.

.

[IdaBriggs]

2. Huh? "Re-distributing wealth?"

The topic is infant mortality - where do you get that?

[CanSocDem]

3. Maybe I don't understand...

...where you personally fit into this issue and if I were wrong to assume that you aspired to the level of the posted link, I apologize.

Just the same, to suggest that infant mortality in a free market economy ISN'T about "re-distributing wealth" in your example, something as mundane and low cost as a 'baby's crib', suggests to me that you may not be as suited to your goals as I originally assumed.

However, if working the political angle is more to your liking, providing post par tum health services to everyone regardless of their ability to PAY, would keep you busy and engaged.

Please don't be offended by my tone; I heartily support individual commitment to social service and doff my hat to you for highlighting how small efforts can produce large and important results.

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[IdaBriggs]

4. Ah. I *think* I understand.

Actually, my personal goal is 60% reduction in Detroit using nutritional intervention in both prenatal and perinatal care; I *definitely* admire / respect the effort in Chicago, and have reached out to them because the "sleep" issue is only a fraction of the problem. (This is obviously a multi-faceted problem, and the "food dessert" issue is one of my pet peeves.) I particularly love the fact someone is taking on something "concrete" as opposed to just throwing up their hands at how "big" the problem is -- I think we can get it down, and I have some ideas on how to do that. Only time will tell whether I am a "well meaning crackpot" or a "visionary genius!" Lol!

For some reason I thought you were saying something different with the "wealth redistribution" comment. My apologies for questioning when no offense was intended.