Healthy Blue Missouri Supports Black Infant and Maternal Health

At a June 27 ceremony at St. Louis’s Delmar DivINe, the Foundation was thrilled to receive and celebrate a $40,000 donation from new corporate partner Healthy Blue Missouri. This generous investment is being used to improve Black infant and maternal health outcomes for community members in three critical ways:

1. Strengthen families through hosting free community baby showers in the spring and fall, connecting hundreds of families with holistic resources and education that improves community awareness and use of doula care.
2. Train clinical care teams by implementing more than 20 culturally congruent workshops to address implicit bias in health care and improve acceptance and knowledge of the doula model among clinical care teams and nursing students.
3. Expand access to perinatal education on nutrition, childbirth, newborn care, postpartum care, and breastfeeding through community events.

Healthy Blue Missouri’s partnership with the Foundation is creating systems-level changes to address the most ingrained maternal and child health disparities in Missouri. Anticipated impacts of this partnership include increasing doula use at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and throughout our community, decreasing barriers for birthing people to access a doula, and ultimately decreasing the number of pre-term births and underweight babies.

“Doulas serve as an effective strategy to address disparities, especially among those who are at higher risk for maternal morbidity and mortality,” says Jeff Davis, Healthy Blue president. “Healthy Blue continues to be at the forefront of advancing health equity through our innovative programs and partnerships that provide access to individualized care to improve the whole health of our members.”

If you would like to enrich and save lives through a corporate partnership, please contact Derek May at [email protected] or 314-273-6233.