News

Sep 28, 2016

This past year kept us busy as we continued our focus on Community Engagement Programs. We held two Community Forums with approximately 73 people in attendance. They were held in Cincinnati and Akron and the focus was to address the disparities in infant mortality in Ohio’s African American communities. The goal was to educate the community about African American infant mortality, SIDS and infant safe sleep practices. 
 
Our Infant Safe Sleep Mini-Grant Program was developed to increase educational initiatives in communities with high infant mortality rates by sharing the lifesaving infant safe sleep message. Each mini-grant project was expected to reach a minimum of 20 participants and we were able to award 33 grants this past year. We were very proud of the outcome of this program as 91 outreach activities took place reaching 1,869 people. We far surpassed our goal!
 
Distribution of infant safe sleep materials is essential as we educate parents and caregivers on the ways to sleep babies safely to reduce the risk of SIDS and to prevent accidental death from positional asphyxia, suffocation and overlay.  We distributed 13,110 infant safe sleep t-shirts as part of our Infant Safe Sleep Program.  In addition, over 10,347 “Keep your sleeping baby safe” brochures were distributed along with 12,080 other safe sleep and bereavement materials. As part of our contract with the Ohio Department of Health, we held 3 SIDS Risk Reduction and Infant Safe Sleep Educational Workshops for professionals in Akron, Toledo and Columbus and had 208 people attend.