Saturday, November 14, 2009

APHA Annual Meeting Recap


Seasons of Life Women's Health and Birth Center board member Kandra Strauss Riggs attended the American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting November 7-11 in Philadelphia and offers her observations.

The American Public Health Association annual meeting is always an uplifting experience for me. Rooms are packed with public health advocates, nurses, students, doctors, educators – all of us with a passion to improve the health and well being of others. At APHA, I feel that I am surrounded by, “my people.” I proudly wore my “Listen to Women” blue button distributed by the American College of Nurse Midwives and had an opportunity to tell many public health advocates about our plans for Seasons of Life – everyone I met was very impressed. Some highlights that can inform our work in establishing Seasons of Life include:

* Meeting Dr. Miriam Labbok who leads the Carolina Breastfeeding Institute at the University of North Carolina – the nation’s only academic institute dedicated to the promotion and research of breastfeeding. They are hosting a conference entitled Breastfeeding and Feminism in March, 2010.

* Learning about a pre-conceptional health promotion program that is helping to improve the infant mortality rates in central Pennsylvania and could be replicated in a more urban setting.

* Hearing about the Text4Baby initiative which is launching in 2010. It is a free texting service that sends pregnant women and new mothers a weekly text health message.

* Amazingly, Georgetown University has a maternal and child health library: http://www.mchlibrary.info/ where we can find all kinds of data to support our work.

I was very proud and happy to distribute information about Seasons of Life at this year’s APHA meeting. Many thanks for the opportunity.

- Kandra Strauss-Riggs, MPH

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