Background on EleVATE Collaborative:

Born in the summer of 2016 without a name in the basement of Affinia Healthcare. A group of health care team members who provided group prenatal care across the city of St. Louis met to discuss the inequitable birth outcomes being experienced by the birthing people and babies we cared for. 

In those early meetings and conversations, the EleVATE Collaborative faced some critical decisions that were pivotal to our work: 1) We needed to promote health equity for the patients we served, 2) We needed to authentically involve patients (community collaborators) to participate in developing, evaluating and implementing the work and be accountable to their voice, 3) We needed to work across institutions, disciplines and departments to make this a collaborative effort.

From the beginning, the EleVATE Collaborative knew our patients and health care teams would benefit from trauma informed care training and behavioral health training. We also needed to acknowledge the racial inequities and demand for systemic transformation after the death of Michael Brown Jr. in 2014.

The Ferguson Commission was created to establish a path towards racial equity. We were inspired by the Ferguson Commission report to address racial equity and name racism as the root cause of the inequities. We made a commitment to provide the best care for patients today, provide opportunities for health care systems to catalyze positive change within their medical practice and health care system and increase accountability of systems to dismantle policies that produce inequities. 

Our collaborative development required and continues to require real vulnerability. Patients, multi-disciplinary team members and organizations working with people experiencing the most inequities needed to be at the table.
We believe that to have positive outcomes for patients, we need a good process:

• How we work together to build strong relationships and to design our initiative
• Acknowledge power dynamics and establish equitable decision making
• Begin with a common language
• Implement community-based participatory research principles
• Community dissemination of process and results

Our collaborative started by looking at data disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, such as preterm birth, low birth weight and maternal mental health outcomes. We formed three committees to move the work: curriculum committee, evaluation committee and steering committee.

Curriculum Committee:

Formed a multi-disciplinary curriculum team to write the group prenatal care curriculum, design health care team trainings and strategies to implement new practices to advance positive health outcomes

Evaluation Committee:

Formed a multi-disciplinary evaluation team to implement community based participatory research principles, acknowledge the harm and hurt research has caused, establish evaluation methods, formalize structures to ensure community participation and source data that is important to the community and the data results are returned to them.

Steering Committee:

Formed a multi-disciplinary team to focus on agreed upon goals for the initiative, overall initiative strategy, initiative oversight, strategies to advance racial equity, systems change and direction for all parts of the initiative.

What is group prenatal care?

Group prenatal care is: 6-10 pregnant people have their prenatal care appointment and group support time.

Group Prenatal Care is associated with improved mental health, and associated with reduced risk of preterm birth in sub-group analysis of Black women.