Two Mercer County hospitals are teaming up to improve maternal health outcomes for their patients.

It's a two year pilot program at Capital Health in Hopewell and Penn Medicine in Princeton aimed at enhancing the relationship between doctors, nurses and the people they care for.

Raven Santana spoke to doctors at one of the participating hospitals about the key parts of this program they believe will make a difference.

We know it's going to happen.

We do this every day and patients do not.

Dr. Cristina Da Vinci is the medical director of labor and delivery in the mother baby unit at Penn Medicine, Princeton Medical Center.

And she says a new pilot program called Raising the Bar for Maternal Health, Equity and Excellence is paving the way to make sure mothers are heard and seen before, during and after birth.

What providers are not used to doing is raising the issue themselves and saying, I understand that there could be this concern, like how can we how can we do this better for you and how can we personalize this for.

You when we think about the crisis around maternal child health?

Raising the bar comes at a perfect time because we're thinking about how can we advance care within the state?

Right.

And so raising the bar is unique in this way because it gathers local hospitals in New Jersey and not only gathers these hospital partners to do this really great work and efforts around raising the bar, but then also brings in community members, which I think is really unique to this particular project.

Christine Ivery is the program officer for New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute that partnered with two hospitals in Mercer County, including Penn Medicine, Princeton Medical Center and Plainsboro.

The two year initiative is focused on improving birth equity, maternal child outcomes and the experiences of people giving birth.

Within the nation, and particularly with a New Jersey.

I always say that we're at a state of crisis when we think about maternal and child health for black women in the state.

They're about seven times more likely to face pregnancy related death compared to their counterparts.

And for black babies, that number is about three times more likely.

There's much more to the picture of the patient, the whole holistic picture of the patient than just having a healthy baby and healthy mom.

We're really now considering how her mental state is.

What did we meet her expectations?

And if not, do we explain why?

The pilot, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, includes three key elements the creation of the state's first ever perinatal community advisory boards at each hospital, reviewing each hospital's maternal health data to identify areas that need improvement, and the implementation of a shared decision making model of care called teen birth, which will improve communication and teamwork throughout the birthing process.

I have the most impact in is the execution of the team birth huddle program on labor and delivery.

And as the medical director, my goal is to make sure the execution of that part of the program goes off well.

I think part of that a lot of that is is education and spreading the word to the medical staff on this is what we're doing.

This is why we're doing it.

Jennifer Hollander is director of patient care services at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center.

She is confident that the program will improve not only the inequities at birth, but safety.

Everyone you think you can think back to times where you think you may be a strong person or you think you're educated.

We just had other conversations, right?

And there's still times, especially in health care, where people are scared to speak up.

They're scared to ask a question that they may feel is silly or stupid or they're intimidated or they think there's something is normal.

And there's components of this program team birth, which I think really gives the opportunity for the patient to be able to do that.

Staff says they are now focused on continuing to gather data from surveys to see how maternal care and infant health outcomes improve as a result of the pilot program for NJ Spotlight News, I'm Raven Santana.