Five on Friday: Maternal Health Inequities in the United States

Fri, 08/27/2021 | by MCN Admin

It’s the end of August! Before you head into the weekend, take a look at these five pieces that MCN staff shared this week. And, of course, one Weekly Win to end the list, to celebrate the positive outcomes of the efforts of our larger network. Have a Weekly Win from your community to share? We’d love to hear about it. Email your recommendation to Claire at cseda@migrantclinician.org.

Kaethe shared new graphics and accompanying article from CNN showing the inequities in pregnancy outcomes for Black women, and the possible exacerbation of the inequity due to the pandemic. Visualizing the Stark Maternal Health Inequities in the United States

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Laz noted this is why his hospital no longer uses convalescent plasma for their hospitalized COVID patients. Convalescent Plasma Flops in High-Risk COVID Outpatients

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The Guardian ran an article chronicling Latinx dairy workers in Wisconsin, entitled, “‘It’s Five Years Since a White Person Applied’: the Immigrant Workforce Milking America’s Cows.”

Amy recommended this supplement to the newest issue of the American Journal of Public Health, which looks at “the urgent need to improve the quality of mortality data and routine surveillance in the context o COVID-19 and beyond.” When Dying Really Counts

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Nurses are suffering and speaking up. Kaethe shared a series of letters from nurses across the country who wrote to the New York Times in response to an article that chronicled the struggles of nurses, entitled “As Delta Rises, Nurse Shortfall Imperils Patients.” Always incredibly important for frontline voices to be represented in the media. How Nurses Are Feeling: Tired, Angry and Hopeless

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Weekly Win: We love hearing about all your successes! We frequently get updates from clinicians in our network and our nonprofit partners about all the incredible work they are doing. In North Carolina, the North Carolina Farmworker Health Program’s Internet Connectivity Project, in partnership with the North Carolina Agromedicine Institute, has funded hotspots for farmworkers, which can help them connect to telehealth. This also assists Greene County Health Care’s mobile unit in connecting to the internet in the field, where they can more easily connect to the COVID-19 vaccine management system as they vaccinate farmworkers. They’ve connected 80 locations to the internet since mid-May and vaccinated 1,180 people in 17 counties, as of last month! Meanwhile in Florida, “'Who Is Going to Help Me?': How a Florida Team Brings Healthcare to this Community” shares the Healthcare Network of Southwest Florida’s outreach efforts, which are supported by a project with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and for which MCN is a partner in developing COVID-19 educational materials. Wonderful to see outreach workers’ efforts celebrated in print!