Enhanced CenteringPregnancy (ECP) is a collaborative community-led initiative that integrates behavioral health, reproductive justice and racial equity components into women’s health care to combat trauma and toxic stress while catalyzing system level changes to improve the outcomes for African-American women in the St. Louis region.
ECP aims to advance equitable outcomes in women’s health by:
1) Reducing inequitable adverse pregnancy outcomes
2) Providing intensive trainings for health care teams to support patients who are experiencing trauma, depression and psychosocial stress as result of racism
3) Broadening the culture of medical practice by elevating and integrating perspectives from communities and healthcare institutions to develop innovative solutions, practices and new approaches to eliminate racial disparities in care delivery while increasing shared accountability to promote direct practice changes.
IHN convenes community partners providing group prenatal care, community collaborators, academics and health care team members with the goal of increasing a collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach to the continuum of care. In addition, providing community partners with tools to prioritize equitable health care practices, elevate community voices and better understand the barriers patients experience when accessing supports and services. The group prenatal care providers at the time of the pilot were Affinia Healthcare, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and St. Mary’s Hospital. Since starting this initiative, five sites in the St. Louis area have added group prenatal care to their women’s health services: Family Care Health Centers -Carondelet and Forest Park Southeast, Jamaa Birth Village, CareSTL Health -Riverview and Mercy Family Medicine/Good Shephard Children and Family Services. This initiative is aligned with FLOURISH St. Louis’s goal of zero racial disparities by 2033.
