The Human Health Show
Complete Show Length in Minutes: 6 minutes
Episode 1: Topic: The Wayne County Babies program
Intro Music Clip: Title: “Tell You Something” (Instrumental) Time: 30 seconds
Intro: Introduction to The Wayne County Babies program Time: 45 seconds
Hello, I am Paris, and welcome to the Human Health Show! In this segment we will discuss a program that has been instituted in the Detroit area, it’s called Wayne County Babies. This program is part of the Wayne County Health Department, it focuses on providing low-income mothers with vital resources and information in an effort to prevent infant mortality and promote healthy babies. This seems like an excellent program and today we’ve invited one of its influential participants and workers, Michelle Jones. Ms. Jones is here with us and she will explain in detail what this program entails and perhaps answer some questions.
Segment Music Clip: Title: “Superwoman” (Instrumental) Time: 15 seconds
Segment: Michelle Jones summarizes the Wayne County Babies program Time: 4 minutes
Paris: Welcome to the Human Health Show Ms. Jones
Michelle: Thank you, it’s good to be here
Paris: I’ve heard some about Wayne County Babies, but why don’t you explain what the program does for our listeners.
Michelle: As you stated Paris, our program is set up to work with low-income mothers living in Wayne County. There are six of us in my office and one of the things we do is home visits. We visit our mothers and educate them on various aspects of motherhood, such as the importance of their prenatal visits. Once the babies are born we are continuing that education in regards to the babies’ welfare, doctor’s visits, and safe sleep habits. I have a clientele list of about thirty mothers. What I do is schedule home visits with the mothers and, or, the babies and I educate them on various forms of information depending on the mothers’ stage in pregnancy. Also, I schedule the mothers for their various appointments and meetings. We stay with the moms and the babies until the babies turn one-year-old. Our primary focus is safe sleep, and so we educate the mom on what safe sleep is, what safe sleep habits are and so on. Our goal is to make sure that that baby reaches his or her first birthday. Michigan has an extremely high infant mortality rate and that’s where we come in to help lower those numbers. In addition, African-American babies have a higher death rate than Caucasian babies. That is due in large part to services available. Incomes are usually drastically different; therefore if income is low, the availability of necessary resources is less than that of a family with a higher income. Also, babies of low-income mothers tend to not eat properly. When mothers are faced with the choice of keeping the electricity on or buying the baby formula, they will often give the baby whole milk and put the extra money toward the electric bill or various other bills or household necessities. That is why the infant mortality rate is higher in urban areas.
Paris: It sounds like you are doing important work Michelle. What are the qualifications in order to be serviced by the program?
Michelle: Thank you, but yes our program is very necessary because we are reaching a lot of families that would never come across this information otherwise. The only qualifications to participate in the program are that the mother be low-income, that is making $12,000 or less, and live in “out Wayne County”, meaning anywhere in Wayne County besides Detroit.
Paris: Why don’t you service Detroit?
Michelle: The reason that we do not service Detroit is because Detroit has its own large health department. We found that the surrounding cities did not have a location such as the Detroit Health Department where they could get various services; therefore, our program was organized to service those areas.
Paris: Well you have provided us with some very important information today, if people wish to get more information on Wayne County Babies what should they do?
Michelle: Yes, if you would like more information on the Wayne County Babies program you can visit waynecounty.com or call our offices at 313-537-1708.
Thank you to Michelle Jones for stopping by and giving us this valuable information, and thank you to our listeners for tuning into The Human Health Show. This is Paris and I’ll be here the same time next week, thank you and have a great day.
Ending Music Clip: Title: “Amanda” Time: 30 seconds
I think your podcast did a great job at explaining the Wayne County Babies program. It seems like every major aspect of the program was described in detail from how the program works to how to the program's contact information.
ReplyDeleteThe format was very easy to follow. Every section of dialogue was labeled with a person's name and also had many line spaces between the speakers to identify who is speaking.
Since I don't know more about the program than what was in the script, I cant say that you left information out, but after reading the script I had a feeling of insight, instead of confusion - so I think you included all the information you needed to cover the topic.