Preconception, premature birth, newborn screening and genetics are all important aspects of perinatal health care. The March of Dimes provides resources and links to help you stay up to date on these critical topics.
Through our Prematurity Campaign, we aim to raise public awareness of the problems of prematurity and decrease the rate of preterm birth in the United States and throughout the world. Special resources for professionals can help you join us in this important effort.
The March of Dimes provides a wide range of patient education resources to help health care professionals inform patients and their families and improve the health of mothers and babies.
Pocket facts
Our Preconception and prenatal genetic screening pocket facts describes widely used screening methods and data for certain birth defects. Our Newborn screening pocket facts focuses on health conditions screened for as part of the standard panel, hearing loss, congenital heart defects, severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome and other metabolic conditions.
Professional collaborations
The March of Dimes works with a number of organizations to bring the most current scientific and clinical information to providers on a number of topics:
- The Alliance for Innovation in Maternal Health (AIM) is an initiative by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity by helping more moms have safe maternity care. Working with hospitals across the United States, AIM works to improve a culture of maternal safety to address the increasing rates of maternal mortality due to obstetric hemorrhage, high blood pressure and blood clots, including venous thromboembolism.
- Beforeandbeyond.org is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) preconception initiative for health care providers.
- The Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS) promotes a wellness model of maternity care to improve birth outcomes and reduce health care costs. Its Breastfeeding is priceless fact sheet offers recommendations for providers to support breastfeeding in clinical practice.
- The Genetics/Genomics Competency Center for Education provides genetics and genomics resources, including competency guidelines and curricula. It also offers a forum for sharing your own activities, resources and assessments.
- The IMPLICIT (Interventions to Minimize Preterm and Low birthweight Infants through Continuous Improvement Techniques) Network is a collaborative of family medicine residencies focused on developing techniques to deliver evidence-based interventions during prenatal care. One of these interventions is performing interconception care (ICC) at pediatric well-child visits. In collaboration with the March of Dimes, the Network developed the IMPLICIT interconception care toolkit to help providers implement the ICC model into their own practice. To download the free toolkit, visit prematurityprevention.org and select the "Toolkits & Reports" tab. You must register for the site in order to access the toolkit.
- The March of Dimes Prematurity Campaign works with partners and alliances to help lead the national effort to fight prematurity.
- The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy seeks to improve the lives and future prospects of children and families through efforts to prevent teen pregnancy and unplanned pregnancy, especially among single, young adults.