Welcoming a baby to a family is an incredible experience. Having a baby is life changing. New mothers and families face challenges in this journey including isolation, unrealistic infant and self-expectations, limited access to needed care, stigma around issues such as mental health, infant feeding, and more. New mothers can experience serious health complications. Investment in women and families during this sensitive time can improve well-being for everyone.
The 4th Trimester Project was created to envision a world where every woman receives the social, emotional, physical, and economic support she needs to successfully transition through the postpartum period and into her new identity and life as a mother. Health care systems, businesses, and society should value and respect women not only for what they bring to families, communities, and nations but also for who they are in and of themselves. The 4th Trimester Project seeks to lift up women’s voices, ideas, and needs so mothers design the change they want to see. We want to change the way America treats new moms.
The newmomhealth.com website was designed by moms for moms and offers resources for new parents across a variety of topics. Content spans physical recovery, adjusting to life with a newborn, and tips for building a village of support. The website includes tools for parents and for providers to improve education and care during this sensitive period of time. Please visit this website to access all of these resources. SaludMadre.com was developed to offer postpartum resources and information in Spanish. View social media links here: Facebook / Instagram / YouTube
Interested in working with our team? Please reach out to any of the team tagged to this project – we are eager to connect.
The Care for NICU Families Project aims to improve postpartum health in and beyond the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for all families. This project is a partnership across the UNC School of Medicine, Reaching our Sisters Everywhere, Mighty Little Giants, and the MILK Lab at the University of San Francisco. This project is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Learn more about our project here: newmomhealth.com/care-for-nicu-families.
The Postnatal Patient Safety Learning Lab was a transdisciplinary collaboration across UNC Chapel Hill, NC State University and Ohio State University to transform postnatal care. The vision was to outline, test and redesign systems of postnatal care in partnership with patients and health care team members to better enable all families to thrive. Members of CMIH played key roles in this project. Click here to visit that project’s website: postnatalsafety.com/about.
