Inventory of Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs) for Healthy Start Programs
Evidence-based practices include actions, activities, strategies, or approaches that improve the health of women, before, during, and after pregnancy in order to improve birth outcomes and give infants up to age two years a healthy start. Also included in the collection are informational materials and tools that make it easier to implement evidence-based practices. To search by title, use the main search box located at the top of this page.
This Doula Program, targeted to low income pregnant women, provides free perinatal services, including community-based childbirth education classes, labor and delivery support, postpartum care, and instruction focusing on mom/baby attachment, extension of breastfeeding duration, and interconception care. Participants in the program have been shown to have a decreased infant mortality rate, reduced need for medical interventions during labor and delivery, and longer duration of breastfeeding their infants.
Topics:
Breastfeeding Other Prenatal Care and Education Reproductive Life Planning/Family Planning
Approaches:
Improve Women's Health Promote Quality
Benchmarks:
Birth Spacing Initiating Breastfeeding Reproductive Life Plan Sustaining Breastfeeding
Evidence Rating:
I. Evidence-based practices—have been rigorously evaluated and shown to be effective by MCH experts.
You Quit Two Quit aims to ensure that there is a comprehensive system in place to screen and treat tobacco use in women, pregnant women, and postpartum mothers. You Quit Two Quit focuses on low-income women, new mothers, and recidivism prevention. Project activities include increasing the number of providers who screen, advise, and refer patients to the North Carolina Quitline, distributing patient and provider education materials statewide, developing best-practice, sustainable, community based smoking cessation projects for women, pregnant women, and new moms, and creating continuity of care by focusing on the preconception, prenatal and perinatal periods, and including an emphasis on preventing postpartum relapse and eliminating second-hand smoke exposure.
Topics:
Tobacco Cessation
Approaches:
Promote Quality
Benchmarks:
Smoking Abstinence
Evidence Rating:
II. Promising practices—Innovative practices employed in the field, based on state-of-science knowledge about what works to improve outcomes, and gathering evidence of effectiveness.
