Jessica Lariz, Senior Human Service Program Manager for Healthy Start, DOH Monroe, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about baby safety.
September is National Baby Safety Month.
Lariz said, “The campaign started in 1983 and it just started to kind of help to raise awareness about choosing, selecting safe products for your baby and helping to establish healthy home environments, or even while you’re traveling. They cover most aspects of anything infant and baby related, things like safe sleep and baby proofing, car seat safety. It’s held in September, because it’s the ninth month of the year, and healthy pregnancies are nine months long.”
The goal of Healthy Start is to promote education referrals and home visits.
Lariz said, “Healthy Start is my program. It’s a great program, something that I’ve done for a long time, almost my entire career, with DOH and the goal is to educate and refer and to do that to lower any risk factors associated with preterm birth, low birth weight and infant mortality. We definitely want babies born as close to 40 weeks as possible, and we’d like them to be over five and a half pounds, which that’s what low birth weight is considered. So anything under five and a half pounds is considered low birth weight. Then once they’re here, we want to keep them safe and healthy for as long as possible.”
Healthy Start can be a home visitation program.
Lariz said, “We prefer to see you in your home, especially when we’re talking about items related to safety. But we certainly don’t have to do it in your home. We can do it in our office. We can do it at your work. We can do it at the library. We can do it at the park, and we touch on, kind of we run the gamut, all things from childbirth education, which would include topics on recognizing the signs and symptoms of preterm labor and when to call your physician. We educate about preparing for birth, the stages of labor, what to expect during labor and delivery, certain relaxation techniques, things like that with childbirth. We do parenting and breastfeeding as well. We touch on all topics. We definitely do smoking cessation education. We don’t want you smoking while you’re pregnant, and we refer to other local agencies for that if you wanted to quit smoking.”
Healthy Start made contact with just about 80% of all pregnant women in the county in 2023. Healthy Start made contact that year with 517 pregnant women and 529 infants.
Lariz said, “Healthy Start is just a piece of all of the great programs that DOH does, but my team, we are small but mighty. We are fortunate that we have care coordinators that speak all three languages, so that definitely helps when we’re reaching out to families in the Keys. Approximately 75% got to hear about who we are, what we do, and how we can help.”
How do we keep babies safe?
Lariz said, “We touch on water heaters. Babies have very delicate skin and water that feels okay to us, could seriously burn them. Most water heaters default to about 120 degrees, and this can actually cause a burn in a baby in under five seconds. So we do like to educate about turning down your water heater. That’s just one small change that could help to keep a baby safe at home. We talk about fire alarms and carbon monoxide alarms and making sure that they’re working. We advise for people to test them every month and then to change your batteries and those alarms when you change your clocks. So if you spring forward, do your fire alarms. If you fall back, do your fire alarms. Another big one is poisoning. A statistic, about every 12 seconds a child under six is exposed to a poison in the United States. So we do a lot of safety. We walk around the house and say, those are medications. Get those out of out of the reach of small children. Those cleaning products need to be locked up. Things as simple as small batteries can look fun to a kiddo that’s crawling around. So we do touch on poisoning. Drowning prevention is a big one. We’re on an island. We’re surrounded by water. It’s the leading cause of injury related deaths in children one to four, and it can happen very quickly, and it can actually happen in as little as one inch of water within seconds. Super, super dangerous, especially when we’re on an island with canals and flooding. So never leave your kiddo unattended, near water, even bathtubs, buckets, while you’re out back washing your car.”
Heat related injuries are discussed as well.
Lariz said, “A child’s body heats up three to five times faster than ours as an adult. So even on a 70 degree day, a car specifically could reach 100 degrees in minutes. So we do talk about always making sure that you got everybody out of your car. I know we all watch the news and we see some scary things related to leaving kiddos in cars. We definitely talk about that, but also staying hydrated, making sure your baby’s hydrated, if you’re going to be out for the day, things like that to keep them safe in the heat.”
Sleep safety is another one.
Lariz said, “I would say sleep safety and car seat safety are two of the biggest that we see in our home visitation and just people coming into the to the office. We encourage people to not sleep with their babies. Always place your baby on their back to sleep, in a crib, no blankets, no pillows, no toys, which is not the common thing to do. You want it to be cute and pretty and look at all of the fun things in the crib, but they can be very dangerous to babies, so just a fitted sheet on a firm mattress, with regards to safe sleep. Then the other big one that we touch on is car seat safety. My staff, we’re all certified car seat technicians, and about 75% of the seats that we see actually the kiddo is in the wrong seat, or the seat is installed incorrectly. So it’s definitely something that we’re happy to do, we can check your car seat pretty quickly. There’s a website called safekids.org. You can go to that and find a car seat technician in your area. But we have car seat technicians up and down the Keys, and we’re happy to help with that.”
Screening tools are also available.
Lariz said, “The domestic violence screening is something that we do for all of our participants and domestic violence is actually something that correlates real closely to keeping babies safe at home. Things can escalate very quickly with domestic violence, and one in 15 children, they’re exposed to violence each year, and 90% of those are eyewitnesses. So we like to say that we do these screenings in an effort to say that there are resources available. The Edinburgh that screens for postpartum depression, which is very common, about one in seven mothers experiences some degree of postpartum depression which can affect bonding with your baby and how your baby develops. So we do those in the third trimester towards the end of your pregnancy, and then we do it also one time around two months postpartum. We look for signs like sadness or anger or feeling overwhelmed, we can offer resources to kind of combat any kind of depression. Our website at DOH, we recently added a link on our website that has a calendar. It’s a brand new, community wide calendar of events. It’s at the very top middle of the main page on our website. And it’s something really great to look at if you’re looking for events, related to health, or really, any event going on up and down the Keys.”
For more information, click here: https://monroe.floridahealth.gov/index.html