Quality Air for
Quality Health
Quality Health
Children take hundreds of breaths every hour. That’s hundreds of opportunities to improve their air quality and improve their health. Here are three ways we’re working with partners to make the most of all those opportunities:
- Limiting the risks of lead exposure, which affects over four million children each year
- Preventing severe asthma attacks so that more children can breathe with ease
- Supporting smoking cessation for pregnant and postpartum women for healthier moms and babies
Equity-Inspired, Systems-Minded
Not all children have equal access to healthy environments. But state policies and programs, community groups, and family supports can help ensure that all children live and play in places that promote their physical and emotional health. Can you identify how each level of the early childhood system can improve environmental health? View our Health Equity Lens, press play and find out.
Get the Tools to Drive Change
Creating environments that encourage developmental promotion and relational health is one of the many ways that NICHQ’s Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems CoIIN is working to change early childhood outcomes. In July, state and community teams from across the country are coming together to hear and learn from experts in the field. Interested in learning with them? Register here to receive a post-conference resource packet including:
- Evidence-based strategies for developmental health promotion
- Ideas for partnering with families
- Policies to leverage at the federal, state and community level
What People Say
It has been an honor to work with NICHQ as a Parent Faculty member. I admire how NICHQ continues to center their work around the people directly impacted by it: families and children. They actively work to include these voices throughout project implementation, ensuring that policies remain grounded in patient experiences and feedback. The expertise and professionalism of NICHQ staff has meant that I always feel supported, and confident that all stake holders are included in the process.
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.
Prior to the working with NICHQ, we had had some broad areas of focus for our plan for the year, but really had no strategy or mechanism for testing whether a change that we implemented was an improvement. And we’d always implement statewide before knowing if the change was beneficial. I’ve seen other participants in NICHQ projects make a similar shift and now think about how things are possible instead of impossible.
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.
Our work to improve children’s vision and eye health in the U.S. has always centered on big ideas and massive systems shifts, thus we found the process of continuous quality improvement to be an exciting new way to tackle the challenges we face in our work.
I want to tell you how much I have enjoyed and learned from all of you at NICHQ. You are enthusiastic, supportive, smart and FUN. You have talked me off the ledge many times when I wanted to quit. You are true leaders and passionate about what you do.
I really can't say enough good things about what your NICHQ team has done to help us get things moving in Texas! I have loved working with all of you and have learned so much from everyone.
