Escambia County Healthy Start Coalition Inc

Healthy start care coordination and services support families in reducing the factors and situations that place pregnant women and infants in jeopardy for poor outcomes. Currently, healthy start services can be offered to prenatal women, interconceptional women within certain criteria, and children up to age three. The most frequently offered healthy start services are outreach, care coordination, childbirth education, parenting education and support, nutrition counseling, psychosocial counseling, tobacco education and cessation counseling, breastfeeding education and support, and interconceptional education and counseling.

Healthy start serves as the local fetal and infant mortality review (fimr) team for escambia county. Fimr strives to address the factors that affect infant and fetal deaths by reviewing individual cases to understand the systemic issues in escambia county and make changes in our local community. In fiscal year 2023-2024, the fimr program significantly expanded to serve not only escambia county, but now also serves santa rosa, okaloosa, and walton counties.

The 1915(b) waiver also includes a component for the provision of choice counseling and case management services to sobra (sixth omnibus budget reconciliation act) women eligible for medicaid due to their pregnancy. Healthy start coalitions assumed responsibility for assuring that all sobra women receive outreach and case management services to assure their access to continuous and ongoing prenatal care and other services as appropriate. Other programs include cribs for kids and others.