It’s been a minute since a Five went live around here. Virginia is getting snow today instead of this sunny weather. The husband and I have a bet as if we’ll actually need the snow machine or not based on the snow forecast. Stay tuned to see who wins the bet.
March of Dimes offers $5000 to graduate nursing students; deadline is March 15, 2022.
Johnson and Johnson has an entire page dedicated to scholarships for students.
HACU scholarships open in mid-Feb!
Indian Health System applications are due by February 28, 2022.
NLN should open up their scholarship in Feb….it’s open through June.
You can find everything I’ve posted on scholarships 24/7 on the MAKE MORE MIDWIVES page.
There’s a lot going on as usual so let’s get to it!
1. Breastfeeding may prevent heart disease.
A research article from the Journal of the American Heart Association looked at 1.2 million women across 8 studies from 1986 to 2009 to see what the relationship was between breastfeeding a mama’s risk for cardiovascular disease. Here’s what they found:
- Compared to women who had never breastfed, women that breastfed during their lifetime has an 11% decreased risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
- Women were followed for 10 years…those who had breastfed were 14% less likely to develop coronary artery disease, 12% less likely to have a stroke; and 17% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.
- There were no differences among women of different ages or number of pregnancies (this is such a cool fact to me!)
2. 2022 Midwifery Conferences
We’re going to do it this year – we’re going to have some in person conferences! Which one(s) are you going to go to? I’m eyeing ACNM in May.
Check out the list: https://empoweringmidwiferyeducation.com/us-midwife-conferences
3. New salary info for nurse practitioners and midwives
I stumbled across registerednursern.com while viewing a YouTube video about nurse practitioner salaries. It’s a good time to be a midwife. The average salary is increasing about $2,000 each year!
The site offers data on RN salaries and other types of nurse practitioners as well.
4. An update on extended postpartum coverage with Medicaid
If you’ve been following the legislation, there’s a lot of underground movement to improve postpartum care. Last month, the Office of Health Policy published a report detailing the benefits of extending coverage. Here are the highlights:
- Medicaid covers 42% of births nationally but 20% of these women become uninsured after their postpartum coverage ends 60 days after the birth of their baby
- 38 states and Washington D.C. have expanded Medicaid since the Affordable Care Act passed under President Obama.
- Disruptions in postpartum care are common but 1 in 3 deaths that are pregnancy related occur between 1 week and 1 month postpartum.
- Seven states have pending legislation to extend Medicaid eligibility from 60 days to 12 months postpartum – some states are proposing 6 months of coverage while some states are proposing 12 months of coverage
- If postpartum coverage was extended to 12 months of care, an additional 720,000 women would gain eligibility during the postpartum period
5. Appropriate caffeine intake in the second trimester of pregnancy is associated reduced diabetes in pregnancy but not hypertensive disorders.
I thought this was interesting! I usually talk about caffeine at the first visit but then address caffeine only if the mama brings it up. But this study compared caffeine use from 10 to 13 weeks and 16 to 22 weeks.
In a cohort of 2,802 patients, between 16 to 22 weeks, 599 women reported no consumption of caffeine (23.6%), 1734 (68.3%) of women report consuming 1-100 milligrams of caffeine, 186 (7.3%) of women reported drinking 101 to 200 milligrams of caffeine, and 20 (0.8%) of women reported consuming greater than 200 milligrams of caffeine.
I thought that women would have reported more caffeine use, but there is likely some bias since the first trimester levels were assessed by blood draw and the second trimeter levels were self reported.
Check out the study here from the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Other goodies…
- The Milk Bank is Expanding Across Kentucky to Help Bluegrass Babies in Need
- WIC’s Breastfeeding social media collection – check these out if you need something to promote breastfeeding all year long!
Hugs,
Jamie
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