On behalf of Maternal and Family Health Services’ Board of Directors and Senior management, I want to express our sincere gratitude to our support staff working from home and particularly our front-line staff who have demonstrated commitment with compassion to provide care and support to the many clients we are serving.
These dedicated professionals, like so many other courageous caregivers across the country, continue to faithfully report to work each day to help those in need. That they do so in the face of this dangerous pandemic and at their own personal risk is testimony to their commitment to our mission of care. At the onset of this crisis and the shelter-at-home directive, we were already well prepared to continue serving clients at more than 17 WIC (Women, Infants and Children) nutrition sites across our 16-county service area.
During this difficult and challenging time of nutrition insecurity for literally millions of Americans, it’s reassuring for our WIC clients to know that they have safe access to our sites where our staff is ready to meet their nutritional needs. Rest assured, we have been extremely vigilant in taking every precaution to ensure the safety and well being of clients and staff at those sites and in virtually every facet of our organization.
At our maternity program at the Circle of Care site in Scranton, we continue to provide safe and critical access to early prenatal and postpartum care to low-income women. We have not missed a beat in ensuring that these women, despite the difficult circumstances they face, deliver healthy babies at our partner hospital, Commonwealth Moses Taylor. We also continue to safely provide accessible, confidential, and quality reproductive healthcare at Circle of Care and other centers in our network, in many cases utilizing telehealth technology. The Nurse-Family Partnership program is also employing telehealth exclusively in caring for pregnant women early in their pregnancy. Our highly qualified home visiting registered nurses have been ‘visiting’ their clients virtually, again to ensure that their care remains uninterrupted.
This unprecedented period in our lifetime has clearly tested our nation’s ability to react and respond to the most trying and challenging circumstances. Many lessons have been learned including how fast we can adapt service delivery with the utilization of technology that should guide us into the future. I know so many of us have read about and have seen television news accounts of the heroic efforts of essential front-line workers such as physicians, nurses, medical technicians, first responders and the many others working to ensure that the public remains cared for, despite having to put themselves in harm’s way every day. We all owe these individuals a profound debt of gratitude and will never forget the sacrifices they are making to help others. I know that at Maternal and Family Health Services, all of us are extremely proud of and grateful for our front-line staff for their selfless acts of caring and kindness. Together, we will all see our way through this, in no small part due to the heroes on the front lines every day.
Bette Cox-Saxton
President & CEO, Maternal & Family Health Services
