CHAMPions (Community Hands Advancing Maternal Health Promotion)

Texas has high maternal mortality rates with CDC data for 2021 showing Texas with 43.9 maternal deaths per 100 000 births compared to California with the lowest rate at 9.7. A report by the US Government Accountability Office found that rural areas in Texas had fewer maternal health providers per capita with dozens of hospital closures resulting in limited access to maternal services especially in areas with a large minority population.

Goals and objectives:

1.Strengthen public health capacity and workforce development by increasing availability of culturally appropriate CHAMPions training on maternal health. Objective 1.1: CE-certified bilingual Maternal CHAMPions training on pregnancy and postpartum health promotion will be developed. 2.Utilize Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) to integrate trained maternal CHAMPions into community-based education and the health care support network to increase access to support and information about maternal health and well-being for at-risk pregnant women. Objective 2.1: a community advisory team will be convened to provide guidance on the development and implementation of the maternal CHAMPions program. Objective 2.2: Maternal CHAMPions will engage with community members by delivering layperson education about maternal health risks. Objective 2.3: Maternal CHAMPions will implement the home visiting intervention. 3. Conduct and facilitate research on the efficacy of the maternal CHAMPions intervention on maternal health promotion to mitigate morbidity and mortality. Objective 3.1 a quality community-centered implementation evaluation of the Maternal CHAMPions intervention will be conducted. Objective 3.2: a quasi-experimental approach to evaluate the impact of the maternal CHAMPions on the priority population will be conducted. Objective 3.3: research results of the implementation and impact evaluation of Maternal CHAMPions will be disseminated. Objective 3.4: performance measure and continuous quality improvement activities will be completed. 4.Build research capacity at two Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and with relevant health-focused CBOs to conduct maternal health research. Objective 4.1: research capacity among the maternal CHAMPions study team will be expanded through research and evaluation training opportunities. Methods: Research methods employed will be community based participatory research and quasi-experimental repeated measures designs. Analysis employs qualitative and quantitative methods to include longitudinal analysis of covariance.

Products:

We will develop a maternal health promotion curriculum to be disseminated as Continuing Education for maternal health workers. We will conduct robust evaluation of the program feasibility and its impact on participants. Findings will be disseminated through presentations at conferences publications in scientific journals and in communities of the priority population. Acknowledging how closely integrated the Maternal CHAMPions will be within communities we will obtain support from local stakeholders to ensure that the program meets the needs of the community.

Evaluation:

Evaluation will include continuous review of tasks and timelines and measurement of program performance measures evaluation outcomes and research findings. Implementation data will be compiled and reported so maternal CHAMPions can review their own progress. The team will address challenges to ensure efficient progress in the study for both implementation and impact efforts.