Track Promoting Maternal and Child Health Launched

An academic track that bolsters the health of mothers and their babies and children launched at the beginning of the 2021–22 academic year.

Three years in the making, the Maternal and Child Health Promotion Track will be available to all Yale School of Public Health students enrolled in the Master of Public Health program.

The program takes a multidisciplinary approach to implementing evidence-based practices to improve maternal and child health (MCH) outcomes. Students will be trained on the importance and application of implementation science to MCH promotion. They will also be required to complete three courses and an internship or practicum to gain applied experience in this area.

“We are very excited about the fact that we have just gotten approval for our brand-new Maternal and Child Health Promotion Track [MCHP], which, in many ways, is a response to popular demand from students and faculty members across departments,” said Professor Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, Ph.D., M.S., director of the new track as well as of YSPH’s Global Health Concentration and Office of Public Health Practice.

The track’s co-director, Donna Spiegelman, Sc.D., the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Biostatistics and the director of the Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science, is equally enthusiastic. “I am thrilled to have the MCHP program join our portfolio of activities,”she said, “and I look forward to engaging students in

innovative training programs and designing and implementing new projects to close the gap in maternal and child health around the world.”

Spiegelman provided one glaring example of the inequities the track plans to address: Maternal mortality is perhaps the world’s greatest health inequity, with the death rate in childbirth in some sub-Saharan African countries around 100 times that in Northern Europe, she said.

“With rates so low among high-income countries, clearly maternal mortality is nearly fully preventable through interventions well known to us; these include the use of simple hygienic delivery practices, control of maternal hypertension through inexpensive generic medications, use of oxytocin to prevent excessive bleeding, and calcium supplementation in regions where dietary calcium intake is low,” Spiegelman said. “The problem is getting these low-cost and simple interventions adopted, contextually adapted and scaled up.”