Health District program connects new mothers with nurses

By Jackie Valley

Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Eighteen-month-old Kamree Colon can’t sit still. Clutching a picture book, she wiggles on the couch and climbs over her mom, exuding the energy of a happy-go-lucky toddler.

And it doesn’t seem to wear her out, even at night. “She thinks at 12 o’clock, it’s a party,” her mother, Kortney Colon, tells a nurse seated across from her on the couch.

The trio are sitting in the family room of a Las Vegas home where Colon, 21, lives with her daughter and grandmother. Deyanira Goss, a community health nurse with the Southern Nevada Health District, visits every two weeks as part of the county’s Nurse-Family Partnership Program, which helps first-time moms navigate pregnancy and parenthood by offering guidance related to nurturing children, breastfeeding and family planning.

Kamree’s erratic sleep schedule is the most recent hurdle that Colon, a first-time mom who’s juggling school and single parenting, is trying to jump over.

“If she wakes up, you kindly let her know that she needs to go back to sleep,” Goss advises her. “You don’t want to turn on the lights because then she will get up.”

In the Las Vegas area, 116 mothers are participating in a national study measuring the effectiveness of these home visits on children’s well-being and development, said Margarita DeSantos, a community health nurse manager at the Health District.

The program enrolls women who are less than 28 weeks pregnant and who live in areas of the Las Vegas Valley that suffer from high rates of poverty, unemployment and school dropouts. Nurses with the program have assisted 373 first-time mothers and their respective children, visiting them regularly before and after the babies were born, up until age 2. Spanish is the primary language for 37 percent of clients, and the program employs several bilingual nurses.

“Serving populations at the highest risk provides the most benefits to the community,” DeSantos said.

Across the nation, more than 31,000 families are enrolled in Nurse-Family Partnership Programs, which began in 1996. The Las Vegas-based program, established seven years ago, is the only one operating in Nevada.

Colon heard about the program when she visited a Women’s Resource Center after learning she was pregnant at age 19. Shocked, she was scared to tell her mother about the unplanned pregnancy, but she liked the idea of one-on-one mentoring, so she called the Nurse-Family Partnership Program two days later.

“I had to realize I’m about to take care of another human being,” she said.

The median age of mothers enrolled in Southern Nevada’s program is 19, and only 48 percent possess a high school diploma or GED, according to the Health District. Their median household income is $9,000.

In the program, nurses educate expectant mothers on everything from eating properly during pregnancy to the importance of nurturing and reading to their newborns, DeSantos said. Nurses also urge mothers to develop a plan for their own futures.

“A lot of people don’t realize that newborns send out cues,” she said. “The nurses work with parents in learning how to recognize those cues.”

The program trumpets a growing body of research that indicates how critical the first months and years of a child’s life are to his or her health and development, DeSantos said. Previous studies of home-visit programs have shown a reduction in behavioral and intellectual problems in children, child abuse and neglect and emergency room visits for accidents and poisonings, according to the national office of the Nurse-Family Partnership.

That’s why Colon regularly reads and talks to Kamree, hoping to bolster her daughter’s vocabulary. And to set a good example, Colon received her high school diploma and enrolled in classes to become an administrative medical assistant. Now, she’s busy planning an upcoming trip to California, which will be her daughter’s first plane ride. Colon already called her pediatrician for tips about flying with a toddler.

“She’s my first priority,” she said, looking down on her smiling daughter.