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February 06, 2023 : After a baby is born, there are still abundant hospital visits that both the child and mother are anticipated to attend.
As per Dr. Melissa Nass of Boston Medical Center, babies should be visited by a doctor within 48 hours of birth, followed by numerous other visits, including a jaundice visit, a weight-check visit, and a one-month examination.
For some patients, getting back and forth to the hospital can often be challenging, depending on access to transportation and child care. Well-resourced patients also say that’s a big ask, Nass told.
Aiming to enhance access to comprehensive healthcare for moms and infants during the first six weeks, Boston Medical Center has collaborated with Celtics United – the social justice part of the Celtics’ Shamrock Foundation – on an initiative named Curbside Care.
Rather than making all those trips to the hospital, care seekers in the Curbside Care program will obtain care in an ambulance, wrapped in the Celtics’ green-and-white colors, that controls right in front of their houses.
“It’s a big box ambulance,” Nass told. “The kind that you would examine on the highway, that has been transformed into a clinic. We can do all the same specialties you could do if you came in to visit the doctor at the clinic.”
Via conversations with players and community leaders, Celtics United recognized six pillars to focus on when it was constructed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. One of the foundations is equity in healthcare.
The senior vice president of ticket sales Celtics Mackenzie Henderson is one of the co-lead on the Celtics United equity in healthcare panel. She stated those conversations led the committee to focus on a pass to health care.
“It’s where they obtain it,” Henderson expressed. “It’s how they take advantage of it, and then to get even more precise, we zeroed in on black and brown mother health because the statistics would take your breath out. Black women in Massachusetts are usually twice as likely to fail from pregnancy-related causes than white women. In Boston independently, Black infant mortality is four times that of white babies.”
As per the Celtics, the mobile care unit will be completely funded for three years and deliver up to 2,100 patient visits annually.
A nurse practitioner and licensed nurse midwife will be on board the unit so that the child and mom can be seen at the same time.
“And this is necessary too,” Nass said. “Because what happens in standard models of care there’s a lot of fragmentation. The baby gets seen in pediatrics, the mother gets seen in obstetrics. That’s multiple trips to the hospital. In this example, they’re seen together and there’s good contact.”
