The Texas Collaborative
for Healthy Mothers
and Babies (TCHMB)
Our mission is to advance health care quality and patient safety for all Texas mothers and babies.
INTERVENTIONS

NEWS
We talk to Dr. George Saade, chair of TCHMB, about his career in maternal and infant health, the work of the Collaborative, and more.
Maternal mortality continues to be the perinatal news topic that most occupies Texas media. Perhaps the most substantive piece on this topic, in recent months, was the Texas Tribune's "Dangerous Deliveries: Is Texas doing enough to stop moms from dying?" It begins with this heartbreaking opening:
James A. Cooley, a healthcare researcher and analyst in the Medical and Social Services division at the Health and Human Services Commission, died Nov. 11, 2017.
In 2015, over half of respondents (61.4%) from 14 states reported bed sharing with their infant, and 38.5% from 13 states and New York City reported using any soft bedding, most commonly bumper pads and thick blankets.
The authors found that compared with women who never used hormonal contraception, the overall relative risk of invasive breast cancer among women who were current or recent users of any hormonal contraception was 1.20 This and more advisories are available here.
The Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies (TCHMB) is facilitating a two-day conference on January 22 – 23, 2018 at the AT&T Conference Center in Austin, Texas. The conference is titled: “Obstetrical and Neonatal Care Coordination Related to Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy."
The first lactation consultant Texas Children's Hospital ever hired and a driving force behind their successful in-house milk bank, Dr. Nancy Hurst continues to change the way Texas understands the importance of breastfeeding and human milk use for premature infants.
The goal of the initiative, and its associated learning collaborative, is to increase the number of very low birth weight infants that will receive human milk, preferably their mother’s milk, as their primary source of nutrition to assist with their immune and gastrointestinal tract development. More specifically, this project is focused on helping participating hospitals identify and overcome barriers to establishing maternal milk supply and barriers to supporting breastfeeding in the NICU. Initiative to Improve Infant Nutrition and Care in NICUs
The Obstetrics Subcommittee continued working on its Induction of Labor (IOL) Quality Improvement (QI) project, to reduce failed indicated induction of labor and ultimately reduce the primary cesarean delivery rate in Texas.
Our mission is to advance health care quality and patient safety for all Texas mothers and babies through the collaboration of all health and community stakeholders.
The AAP recommends that all babies be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months of life. The importance of breastmilk diets is even greater for preterm, very low birth weight babies hospitalized in NICUs. But it can be a struggle to provide these infants with the nutrition they so desperately need. That's where the TCHMB's NICU collaborative comes in.