“Our HealthNet” starts with the staff that come in every day prepared to assist our clients with getting their needs met and helping them to become self- sufficient. Debra Marshall comes in daily before our doors even open to make a fresh hot pot of coffee and to put the sign- up sheet out for the clients. She then unlocks the door and welcomes in our clients who come to the Homeless Initative Program (H.I.P.) for a variety of reasons. Other staff members; from Mandy, one of our MA’s that administers shots with caring hands to our smallest clients that are in shelters; to David, our resident professor who’s a part of the employment team; to Stacey, who sees hundreds of new faces in triage; to Donnie, who gains the trust of clients living on the street and in camps; to Gary, who says thank you to our men and women veterans by assisting them through our per diem program; to Jennifer, who has clients bringing in envelopes full of receipts to make sure their staying on budget in case management; to Trina, who makes sure all of the clients medical files are in order; to Sharon, the director of the agency who on a daily basis stays late completing grant reports and crunching numbers to make sure that HIP will be able to open our doors again  tomorrow.

Our HIP team during last year’s National Health Center Week!

“Our HealthNet” continues with the clients that walk through our doors on an everyday basis requesting assistance. HIP has long been a place where clients know they can come in and be treated with dignity and respect no matter whether they live in a shelter, where their door might be to a room that’s shared with three other people, or their own place, where their door might have an eviction notice taped on it, or in a camp, where their door might be made from a recycled card board box. Our doors have seen many faces, happy faces, sad faces, distraught faces, discouraged faces and content faces. Our job is to make sure that no matter what door they are coming from, when they walk through our doors we give them 100% of our time, our talent and our ability to make sure that they will one day walk through their own doors.

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Editor’s note: This month’s theme is “Our HealthNet”!  Our bloggers have taken on this topic and are talking about how it takes a community for us to provide quality health care and support services.  Click here to find out more about our topic this month.

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.