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Maternal Child Health Indicators For Brooklyn
High Need Areas 2000 - 2002
The Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) in
Brooklyn declined from 13.2 to 6.9 from 1990-2002.
The efforts of government, several CBOs and healthcare organizations
that collaborated over these years for outreach, education,
access and service provision, contributed to this improvement.
Brooklyn Perinatal Network (BPN)
has been providing leadership and outreach to coordinate community
collaborative efforts for reaching and serving women and families
at high risk of poor pregnancy outcomes. Severe
disparities and high and rising infant deaths still trouble
many communities in our borough. This is where we must and
are now placing our emphasis, resources and efforts to prevent
cuts in services.
BPN convenes the Brooklyn
Task Force on Infant and Maternal Mortality and Family Health
to address IMR and MCH improvement, targeting birthing families,
women at-risk of experiencing an infant death and service
providers. The community activities
and services funded by the City Council Infant Mortality Reduction
Initiative are very important to our work. Priority funding
in the City, State and Federal budgets for infant mortality
reduction (and other needed health and human services) is
needed, each year, until the grave disparities are eliminated.
Our children are New York’s future. We should
invest in a healthy start for them.
table showing
facts about infant deaths in Brooklyn
A Healthy Start Means:
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Ensuring healthy pregnancies |
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Healthy births |
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Healthy early childhood development, etc.. and; |
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The sustained availability of needed services and timely
access to achieve the above the results. |
Budget cuts to safety net services
undermine the adequacy and quality of needed services and
the service system.
We ask your support to ensure that
funding of IMR services at the community level and other needed
public health safety net services receive a very high funding
priority in the City Council budget yearly.
In the post 911 era, when
national security and increased public surveillance of citizens
have become a more prominent concern for all, more and more
people are becoming afraid to access available public-funded
services. Much more work is therefore
needed at the community level to get people to use needed
services timely. Every infant born needs to have a
healthy start in life and to grow up to maximize their potential
to serve this country and this City well. Protecting
our children’s health and ensuring that the public health
services they need are available must be a priority at all
levels of government. The City Council is strongly urged to
do its part for New York City’s future. Prevent Budget
Cuts To Safety Net Services.
Despite significant improvements in some of the MCH indicators,
Brooklyn still has some of the poorest IMR/ MCH indicators
and the largest numbers of infants affected, more than any
other borough of the city.
table showing
facts about infant deaths in Brooklyn
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