In this section, South Dakota MCH Title V reports on planned activities in the Child Health Domain for the period October 1, 2022, through September 30, 2023. In the upcoming year, the Child Domain will continue to focus on parenting education and support and improving developmental screening rates in South Dakota.
Priority Need: Parenting education and support
NPM 6: Percent of children, ages 9 through 35 months, receiving a developmental screening using a parent-completed screening tool
Previous ESM: Percentage of Community Health Offices that distribute trifold developmental screening tracking cards
New ESM 6.1: Percentage of children enrolled in Bright Start Home Visiting that receive a developmental screen by 18 months of age.
2022-2023 Objective and Strategies
Objective: Increase the percent of children from non-metropolitan areas 9 through 35 months who received a developmental screening using a parent-completed screening tool in the past year from 22.3% (2019-2020) to 36.5% by 2025 (NSCH)
The MCH Child Domain will continue to see many changes in the upcoming grant year. Many factors contributed to these changes, including an office-wide services assessment that resulted in new and improved processes for service delivery, the expansion of Infant Death Review to include all child deaths up to age 13, and the state legislature’s approval to increase funding to expand Bright Start Home Visiting services statewide. The MCH Child domain is always evolving to meet the priority needs of families and adapt to changing circumstances in program structure and data collection.
Proposed Strategies:
6.1: Utilize Community Health offices and Bright Start Home Visiting Program to provide Ages and Stages Developmental Screening tool to clients.
This is a new strategy for the child domain. The previous strategy, “Develop and equitably disseminate a clear and consistent message to communicate the importance of developmental screening to families and community health providers,” has been reworded to more broadly address the work being done and create an evidence-based strategy for basis of measurement of the percentage of Bright Start Home Visiting clients who receive a developmental screen. The Bright Start Program will be expanding statewide in 2022-2023 under the supervision and leadership of the MCH Director and will be adding an epidemiologist to assess the program’s impact in many different areas, including developmental screening. A new ESM has been created to measure the percentage of children enrolled in Bright Start Home Visiting that receive a developmental screen by 18 months of age. This measure will track the progress of the Bright Start Home Visiting Program in providing developmental screens throughout the expansion process and beyond. The measure will replace the previous ESM, “Percentage of community health offices who distribute trifold developmental screening tracking cards.” The former ESM was replaced because it does not measure the number or impact of screens taking place, and all community health offices that provide developmental screening consistently distribute the cards. The new ESM will not change the community health offices’ continued efforts to distribute developmental screening tracking cards to families but will provide a more accurate measurement of the work being done around developmental screening.
The community health offices in the state will also continue to provide developmental screening, referrals, and education. In January 2022, an electronic health record (EHR) was implemented in all community health offices to streamline data collection and documentation. The EHR will host data from family planning, nurse home visiting, and community health services. Over the next year, data collected through the EHR will give the MCH team a new opportunity to analyze data from programs and services and link risk factors to outcomes. It will also assist in identifying areas where quality improvement is needed.
The community health offices and Bright Start Home Visiting program will continue to provide training to staff on developmental screening and early identification as part of their orientation. Staff are specifically trained in providing and scoring ASQ developmental questionnaires. Ongoing training will also be provided, and staff will be encouraged to sign up for Brookes’ Newsletters. Staff are also trained in using the CDC Milestone Tracker app, Bright by Text app, and Text4Baby and encouraged to assist families with signing up for these services. In addition to technology resources, community health and Bright Start will also offer hard copy resources, including trifold developmental screening tracking cards, milestone checklists, books, and pamphlets to assist families in planning and tracking their child’s development and screening.
6.2: Create new and promote existing parenting resources to support healthy children and families
The NPM 6 workgroup will continue to identify parenting resources across the state and collaborate on promotion and dissemination to families. As stated above, community health and Bright Start staff will continue to educate parents on developmental screening through both hard copy and technological resources. In additional to growth and development, education will also be provided in the community health and home visiting setting on a variety of topics that impact children, including immunizations, health and safety including safe sleep, well child checks, oral health, dietary needs, breastfeeding, and community resources. Education is also provided for parent health including depression screening and referral, pregnancy care, disease prevention, injury prevention, and adult immunizations.
With the expansion of infant death review to include all child deaths up to age 13, the child domain will be putting the data collected from Child Death Review into practice by raising awareness of the leading causes of child injury and death through messaging and educational resources. The DOH Injury Prevention Coordinator will be stepping in to lead the MCH child domain in 2022. The Injury Prevention Coordinator will serve as a vital connection between the MCH Program and public safety, violence prevention, and substance use prevention organizations. They will be a part of Child Death Review committee discussions and will create messaging and resources with an injury prevention focus. They will also continue to monitor progress with developmental screening and provide ongoing training resources to staff. The Injury Prevention Coordinator and current Child domain leader will co-lead the child domain until October 2022, when the injury prevention coordinator will assume leadership.
6.3: Collaborate with partners to identify gaps in parenting education and support and reduce duplication of efforts
The Bright Start Home Visiting manager will continue to report to the MCH Director and collaborate with the MCH child domain leader and workgroup to reduce duplication of and/or gaps in developmental screenings and referrals for evaluation between home visiting and other OCFS programs.
The new MCH child domain leader will facilitate the MCH child workgroup with plans to expand the workgroup to include injury prevention partners. The group will continue to have representation from the Department of Education, Department of Social Services, Sanford Health, Avera Health, Bright Start Home Visiting, and South Dakota Parent Connection.
MCH and WIC are currently collaborating to add MCH domain leaders to an internal communication site, Knowledge Base, that will provide a clear pathway for communication and training between MCH domain leaders and community health field staff. The site is currently used by WIC leadership to communicate announcements and training to community health staff. Each MCH domain leader will have their own space within the site to communicate updates, trainings, requests, and obtain feedback from field staff.
The current child domain leader, who also serves as CYSHCN Director, will continue to serve on a Medicaid well-child affinity group focused on improving well-child visits in the American Indian/Alaskan Native population 0-15 months of age. The child domain leader coordinated the dissemination of well-child rack cards to nine WIC sites that primarily serve the target population in 2022. Three Horizon Healthcare sites also received the rack cards. The rack cards will be handed out to families by nurses and dieticians along with verbal education on scheduling well-child visits. The affinity group will be utilizing Medicaid IDs and claims data to track each families’ well-child activities through 2023 to determine if the rack cards were effective in prompting the families to attend recommended well-child visits.
Ongoing Efforts Supported by MCH for the Child Domain
In addition to the above planned activities, the MCH Program will continue to provide support to the following programs for children:
- School Health services, which include basic student health screening, vision screening, scoliosis screening, hearing screening, and health education, are provided at the request of contracting schools. Oral health screening is incorporated with WIC services. Funding supports interpreter services for non-English speaking families and children served.
- Park RX Program: WIC programs in South Dakota will be able to prescribe exercise to participants. Participants can take their Park Rx to any South Dakota State Park and turn it in for a free pass for the day. Participants can also turn in the pass that same day and receive a discounted annual pass to encourage yearlong activity.
To Top
Narrative Search