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Our Systems Meant to Help
Are Hurting Black Families
When does mandated reporting hurt rather than improve health outcomes? Erin Cloud, who’s spent the past seven years advocating for parents in the child welfare system, shares a thought provoking story about what happens when biased reporting causes unintentional harm. Here, we shine a spotlight on this troubling example of when systems meant to support children’s health end up failing black mothers and children.
Starting School Prepared Should
Be a Right, Not a Privilege 
Parental income and maternal education are among many social determinants of health that predict children’s outcomes before birth and through their early years. These determinants cause children to start kindergarten at various stages of readiness. We think all children should have the chance to start school on equal footing. Read on to hear how we’re building stronger systems that support and empower families so all children can achieve kindergarten readiness.  
Addressing Safe Sleep Disparities
Starts By Building Trust
Healthy babies shouldn’t die in their sleep. But despite decades of trying to reduce the number of sudden unexpected infant deaths, they persist. And most often, their persistence affects families of color. In this article, we share ideas on how we can best address this alarming lack of equity and reduce sleep-related deaths across all populations.
Use Evaluation to Guide PDSAs
Rather Than Derail Them
Evaluation is a critical tool for any improvement project. Yet, teams sometimes find themselves mistaking evaluation tasks for tests of change, which stalls their PDSAs. Here, we help you differentiate between tests and tasks so that you can use evaluation as the powerful tool it should be: one that informs and launches your test of change.

Did You Miss Out on Our Most
Popular Webinar to Date?
We had over 6,000 registrants for NICHQ’s webinar: Improving Infant Safe Sleep Conversations, Strategies for Helping Families Adopt Safe Sleep Habits. Founder of the Global Infant Safe Sleep Center, Stacy Scott, PhD, MPA, led a series of role playing exercises on how to engage families from different backgrounds in meaningful conversations about safe sleep. Don’t worry if you missed it; a full recording of the webinar is available online. Watch it today.
In Case You Missed It
  • New Early Childhood Webpage: Interested in transforming early childhood systems so that more children are set up to reach their optimal health? Our early childhood webpage is your hub for finding out about current initiatives, tapping into helpful resources and discovering recent news and inspirational stories.
  • We’ve Got News: We’ve added a dedicated news page to our site so that you can easily stay up-to-date on announcements about our projects, people and mission.

In Case You Missed It

  • Two NICHQ Moms Share Their Stories: Here, Colleen Murphy, MSMOB shares how a shooting at her daughter’s school inspired her to seek improvements that support social-emotional health. Or, hear from Meghan Johnson, MSc, whose tumultuous experience navigating early childhood screenings and supports makes her even more committed to uncomplicating children’s health systems.
  • NICHQ Names New Chief Health Officer: Elizabeth Coté, MD, MPA joined NICHQ’s executive team as Chief Health Officer on May 31. Find out more about how her experiences will help advance NICHQ’s mission as a leader in children’s health.

Learn more about NICHQ’s current initiatives, capabilities and how we partner with mission-aligned organizations to drive change to improve children’s health at NICHQ.org.