Magnolia launches preconception health toolkit and primary care initiatives, and Life Course Group Model

The Magnolia Project, the Coalition’s federal Healthy Start program, launched several new initiatives in 2014 to better meet the needs of clients based on their life course and to address gaps in services in the community:

  • Life Course Approach: The Project began providing life course education through weekly group activities. Group education focused on topics related to the three Life Plan domains:
    • Access to preventive health care and related risk reduction services that improve a woman’s chances for a healthy birth in the future. This includes basic reproductive health services, such as GYN care and family planning, as well as care for chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension and obesity.
    • Family and Community support including activities that provide at-risk women with the skills to develop healthy relationships and connectedness with communities through civic engagement and participation.
    • Reduction of poverty and social inequities that assist participants in completing their education, gaining job skills, confronting discrimination and racism, and developing financial literacy.

Participants are encouraged to take part in group education activities based on the goals they have set in their Life Plans.

  • Primary Care: The Magnolia Project will offer primary care services one day a week at the clinic as a pilot. Magnolia participants that utilize clinical services will have the opportunity to receive primary care at the clinic to help them manage other health conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.
  • Preconception Health: Within the Magnolia Project clinic, the primary care and reproductive health ARNPs will implement the Preconception Care Clinical toolkit, a series of evidence-based recommendations for delivery of preventive care and reproductive health services. The goal of the toolkit is to help clinicians reach every woman who might someday become pregnant every time she presents for routine primary care with efficient, evidence-based strategies and resources. Magnolia will also create a model intervention using material from the toolkit and the Show Your Love campaign for use by home visitors/case managers in promoting and supporting reproductive health planning by at-risk women of childbearing age.
  • Postpartum Depression: To address postpartum depression, Magnolia is offering the Mother and Babies Course (MB): Preventing Postpartum Depression, an evidence-based group and home visitation intervention for use with at-risk pre- and inter-conceptional women served by the Magnolia Project. It provides these women with a course aimed at preventing the onset of major depressive episodes, allowing them to practice ways to free their mind and connect with others.