Improving access to health care through reliable transportation has been a top priority area for reducing infant mortality in St. Louis. This summer, FLOURISH St. Louis representatives attended the International Conference on Transport and Health (ICTH), which brings together policymakers, practitioners and academics involved in transport planning and engineering, public health, urban planning, spatial and architectural design, environmental planning, and economics to share best practices. During the conference, FLOURISH presented how St. Louis has mobilized community, health and transportation sectors to improve maternal and infant health outcomes.
“Over half of high-need patients cite transportation as their primary reason for missing medical appointments,” said Kendra Copanas, executive director at Generate Health. “In a region where one in five households don’t have a car and public transit is challenging to navigate, pregnant moms and babies are at risk of receiving inadequate health care. This contributes to high infant mortality rates in St. Louis.”
Teresa Wilke, strategic consultant for FLOURISH, received a high-scoring abstract award for her submission focused on FLOURISH’s BUILD project. As a BUILD Health Challenge grantee, FLOURISH has been working to engage new partners in managed care, Metro Transit, medical transportation and policy advocacy to improve transportation access for two high-need zip codes that suffer from infant mortality rates three times the state average.
“We saw this conference as an opportunity to learn from practitioners and researchers around the world and inform them about how St. Louis is making the connection between transportation and improved health,” said Wilke.
“Since launching this project last year, FLOURISH has been able to build on its Transportation Action Team infrastructure and bring together partners that traditionally would not have collaborated on this type of work,” added Wilke. “We also acknowledge the pivots FLOURISH has made to ensure that the project promotes race equity and centers on the priorities of local residents. We hope this model and our candor about lessons learned might inspire other regions to try something similar to improve the relationship between transportation and health in their own communities.”
Wilke, Copanas and Steve Parish, strategic consultant for community mobilization, presented their learnings from FLOURISH’s BUILD work so far in a collaborative session of their three abstracts. Wilke discussed how FLOURISH developed the grant proposal that secured the BUILD Health Challenge grant award, and the coordination needed across multiple hospital systems, regional health organizations and transit partners to support the BUILD project. She also shared how the data workgroup has helped project partners and stakeholders better understand the transportation problems that exist in the region, and how structures for cross-sector projects can inhibit community member involvement. A separate presentation covered the team’s collaborative work. Download slides from the presentation.
The FLOURISH Transportation Action Team is chaired by Bethany Johnson-Javois, CEO of St. Louis Integrated Health Network, and Lou Gianquinto, president of Missouri Care. Their leadership and the dedication of action team members has made this progress possible.
If you would like to learn more about FLOURISH’s work to improve transportation access for St. Louis families, contact Kendra Copanas at kcopanas@generatehealthstl.org.
