Honoring Black History Month
Recommended Reading
Thought-provoking books can pave the way for change by inspiring understanding, compassion, and inquiry. Interested in finding out what’s on our equity reading list? In this article, NICHQ staff share the books that most impacted their understanding of inequities and what’s needed to achieve equity.
Have your own recommendation? Share it with @NICHQ on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Watch a Webinar on Combating Racism
Did you miss our recent webinar, From Awareness to Action: Strategies for Combating Racism in Health Systems? The recording is now ready for viewing! In this webinar, you’ll learn how to use a racial equity lens to guide health improvement initiatives and effect organizational change. Watch it today.
Portraits of African-American heroes, including Blanche Kelso Bruce, Frederick Douglass, and Hiram Rhoades Revels.
Overcoming Unjust Systems
As a nation, we’ve developed and perpetuated unjust systems that have created an unfair playing field for people of color. Yet despite this persistent adversity, Black Americans continue to lead American cultural, scientific and technological advancements.
As we move into this new decade, NICHQ not only celebrates those accomplishments, but also pledges to promote equity, so that future accomplishments no longer require overcoming an unjust set of obstacles. Here, NICHQ CEO Scott D. Berns expands on his personal and professional commitment.
Be a Children's Health Change Agent
Like you, we have a shared passion for improving the health of every child in every state across the country. Join us in our mission. Take action to make a difference for children now and in the decades to come:
- Donate. Give a gift that supports NICHQ’s initiatives that touch millions of children’s lives. Every dollar raised benefits the health and well-being of children.
- Sign up. Join our network of thousands of other subscribers. We deliver resources, articles and webinars right to your inbox so that we can drive change in children’s health outcomes together.
What People Are Saying
I'm passionate about early identification and connection to services and supports for children and families because we know acting early makes a difference. When I learned that the ECCS CoIIN leverages collaboration, innovation and quality improvement methods to improve early childhood systems, I was thrilled to get involved. There is a great focus on parent engagement too, so I was really happy to join the team and be a part of this great work.
Through the Infant Mortality CoIIN, NICHQ has found effective ways to engage all states around six areas of effort to reduce infant mortality and improve birth outcomes. With the support of NICHQ staff and expert consultants, state maternal child health leaders are learning to use traditional quality improvement and innovative approaches to maximize the leadership roles, and to use a health equity lens in this work.
Working with NICHQ has been a very rewarding experience … A partnership with families has been a hallmark of what the Maternal and Child Health Bureau has done for years, but NICHQ really demonstrated how important those partnerships are.
In over 21 years of caring for my son with complex congenital heart defects plus my 20 years working in healthcare quality improvement and my 6 plus years as a patient advocate, I've never known anyone to embrace closing the gaps between patients and healthcare institutions or doctors, as much as the people from NICHQ.
NICHQ has really supported our work by formalizing a process to do PDSA cycles, report and track how our progress is doing. As a data person, CoLab has been really instrumental in terms of gathering the data and tracking it over time.
NICHQ’s role in coordinating these grantees working on improving sickle cell care and making an agenda that at least tries to push for improved care for all of these patients is very important. The role has been not been very well-served and NICHQ, in my mind, has the experience and staff expertise to bring to sickle cell disease the sort of rigor in methods development and analysis of outcomes to move the bar of caring for people with sickle cell disease several notches up.
Being a parent partner for NICHQ ...has been a pure honor. I would encourage anyone that has the opportunity to work on a NICHQ project to take advantage of it. Working with them has opened many doors for me in the medical field.
