[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE2wqUEBZgM?hd=1&w=480&h=360]

 
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq3Wdab3t-Y?hd=1&w=480&h=360]

For several years we beat the streets in the inner city surrounding our health centers,  reaching out to pregnant women and their families and going into neighborhoods that others would not want to be caught dead in.   Every day over the years we have helped thousands and thousands of families.

We have helped make healthier babies and healthier families. 

During these long years, there were many families that we would visit that really needed more intensive services that we were not able to provide, particularly those families with unwanted pregnancies that were having difficulty bonding with their babies and families that were hurting in many ways.   We called other agencies to try to get intensive services for families to improve family functioning and were told that they only accepted referrals from Child Protective Services.

Basically,  a child had to be hurt or neglected in order to receive help and many families were hungry for this help – to parent differently than they were parented. 

Then, there was an answer to our prayers. 
Healthy Families America came to Indiana! 
We were the only agency in our fine city that wanted  to prevent child abuse and neglect  as a primary focus.  We applied and received $45,000 to start, and over the next several  years, we received additional funding.  Although the joy of growing this program was not as intense as BIBs, that endured  months and months of serious growing pains, it was and still is very exciting.

I believe that there is no job more important than BIBs and Healthy Families.   This is because it all starts with the bond during the pregnancy and after the birth between the parent and their child, born or unborn.   This bond has far-reaching implications for determining a child’s success in school, preventing teen pregnancy, reducing juvenile delinquency, and a number of other childhood outcomes that can predict success as an adult.

A supervisor once told me that she found it difficult to describe what our programs did, and I said -

“That’s easy; we save lives” maybe not in the sense of actual life and death but  quality of life.

We are a village, HealthNet, Better Indy Babies and Healthy Families.  We ask you to join us in our cause of helping to make sure that babies are born healthy and that children are raised in safe and nurturing environments.

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To learn more about he BIBs/HF Takeover, click here.
Or you can join in on our week-long baby shower to benefit Better Indy Babies & Healthy Families participants!

I am so incredibly proud to work with these programs and with the home visitors, supervisors and support staff.

Twenty years ago, I heard about the Better Indy Babies program getting started and thought to myself,  “this is my dream job”.   I am forever indebted to Vicki Timm, who was the Director of Community Oriented Care at HealthNet at that time, for giving me the opportunity to  serve families and children, in what I believe has been my purpose in life, besides being the mother to my daughters.

As you can see by what some of the other staff members have said, this is not just a job and a calling to many.  I was very proud when some peer reviewers visited our site several years ago and said to me, in the first few hours of a three- day visit, that they knew within a few minutes of meeting the staff that this was not just a job for them.

Better Indy Babies has been like my baby that has grown into a young adult.

Its development has not been without challenges,  but it still remains strong and extremely effective in helping improve birth outcomes.  Positive birth outcomes are foremost in the minds of our dedicated and caring team of Nurse Midwives at HealthNet.  The infant mortality rate, that was so high in the 1980s, is still a complex problem caused by a myriad of social issues still present in the neighborhoods that we serve.   I am extremely thankful that HealthNet is still proud to be able to present BIBs to our patients as an integral part of the OB patients’ care.

We tell the participants that  we come to your home to offer education and support,  because we really care about you and your family, and we really care about the health of your unborn baby.

HealthNet really does
GIVE A CARE!

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Stay tuned for Part 2 which will be posted tomorrow morning.  An easy way to be alerted is to enter you email address in the right-hand column to subscribe to our blog and get posts sent straight to your inbox!
To learn more about Better Indy Babies & Healthy Families along with what has gone on during the BIBs/HF Takeover, click here.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHliJwV2o4M?hd=1]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiuLlJQRdSU?hd=1]