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A community health program at Mercy Southeast is celebrating 25 years of successfully changing the lives of hundreds of moms in Southeast Missouri.
Building Blocks of Southeast Missouri, a free, evidence-based community health program, provides pregnant women with their own free, personal nurse. The nurse begins visiting them during pregnancy and continues meeting with them and their families on a regular basis. Building Blocks implements the Nurse-Family Partnership model of nursing care through home visits focused on assisting moms with education, resources, encouragement and support.
Theresa Glastetter, nursing supervisor, and Nicki Kraust, outreach coordinator, have been with the program since 2002. Building Blocks started in 1999 with two nurses serving 50 clients. Today, the program has grown to eight nurses serving more than 200 clients across 13 counties.
“Nurses come to work for the program, and they stay,” Kraust said. “Sometimes, I’ll run into a mom who tells me she was in the program 16 years ago, and she’ll talk about the nurse’s impact on their life, and that nurse is still with us.”
Building Blocks provides a wide range of services and care for both mom and baby. The program provides or connects moms to resources for car seats, safety gates, and cabinet and door locks – many items needed in the home.
“We assess for health habits like smoking or drug use, partner violence, depression and anxiety, development assessments on babies and more,” Glastetter said. “We also talk with moms about child bonding and attachment, child development, how babies learn, infant safety and safe sleeping habits for both mom and baby.”
From the time the mother enters Building Blocks, home visits are set up on a regular basis, starting every week for four weeks, cascading to every two weeks until the baby is born. Afterward, visits are once a week for six weeks, once every two weeks until the baby is 21 months, and then monthly until baby reaches two years old. At that time, the mother and child successfully graduate from the program.
“It’s one of the more frequent home visitation models out there,” Glastetter said. “We focus on health, but it’s not necessarily a medical model. It’s more of a psychological-social model because we focus on everything in their lives – relationships, education, mental health, behavioral health, preparing them for labor and delivery and working with them on how they’re going to feed their child whether that be breastfeeding or formula feeding.”
The program is designed for:
- Pregnant women who qualify for Medicaid or the WIC program
- Residents of Bollinger, Butler, Cape Girardeau, Dunklin, Mississippi, New Madrid, Pemiscot, Perry, Ripley, Sainte Genevieve, Scott, Stoddard and Wayne counties
“Sometimes, after the two-and-a-half years you’re with a mom, you don’t get the immediate satisfaction that the program worked,” Glastetter said. “But then, years later, you see her somewhere, and she recognizes and hugs you. Her life has turned around. She’s working and has gone to school to further her education. She tells you her son is the best reader in the class. One thing Building Blocks does is teach that things happen in baby steps.”
Building Blocks is currently accepting new applicants. For more information, call 573-335-1011.
