LYNN — As the Lynn Community Health Center celebrates its 50th anniversary during a gala on Friday night, they will also be celebrating the work of the OB-GYN and “Moms Do Care” departments.
The Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC) is hosting a “Fund A Need” fundraiser that will take place at the gala, specifically highlighting and benefiting the work of those two departments.
LCHC is the only health center in the state that provides full-spectrum OB-GYN care and delivers its own patients’ babies at Salem Hospital, said Team Medical Director for the OB-GYN department Kristen Cotter.
Last year, LCHC delivered 515 babies, as Cotter said the health center has really made OB-GYN care a part of its mission.
“We believe in taking care of people throughout their entire life, so we take care of their newborns… and we take care of people all the way until the end of life and that includes pregnancy,” Cotter, who has worked at LCHC for 14 years, said. “Our mission is to provide outstanding medical care to all people, regardless of ability to pay.”
During the pandemic, the OB-GYN department never closed its doors, having to move some visits to remote, but still working in person.
“For some OB care, people have to come in so we can hear their heartbeats, measure their bellies to make sure their babies are growing, and check their blood pressure,” Cotter said. “We never had a break in prenatal care through all of it (the pandemic). That means if people had active COVID, if they were sick with COVID and in a high-risk pregnancy, then their baby needed monitoring and we had to find a way to see them while they had COVID.”
Cotter said they had a lot of women who came in to deliver their babies and tested positive for COVID-19 when they arrived at the hospital, but the baby still had to be born.
“Learning to adjust to a COVID-positve environment was tremendous and we are really proud to be able to pull that off,” Cotter said. “As the whole world was locked down, due dates still came… or that C-section still had to be done.”
LCHC also spent a lot of time educating its pregnant patients on the COVID-19 vaccine and reassuring them that it is safe to get vaccinated while pregnant.
Running an OB-GYN department is not a money-making specialty and is expensive to provide, said Cotter, but LCHC has decided to continue to offer it because “our value system says we should provide outstanding care to women straight through their pregnancy.”
The “Fund a Need” fundraiser at the gala will help with that deficit.
In addition to the OB-GYN receiving some of these funds, the “Moms Do Care” program will as well. This program helps pregnant, postpartum and parenting women with substance-use treatment and recovery services, healthcare services and social services.
Moms Do Care supports women in their recovery before and after they give birth and through the early years of parenting by offering case management, counseling, ways to keep custody and parenting groups.
Dr. Elizabeth Quinn has been the head of the Moms Do Care program since it started in August 2018.
In 2018, Quinn applied for state funding for the Moms Do Care program, allowing them to expand their resources.
Originally, this was two years of funding and LCHC had to reapply, but last year, Quinn said the state Department of Public Health said it was “so happy” with the program and is focusing on making it a permanent part of the public-health infrastructure.
“I think there are five other Moms Do Care programs across the state, and they (the state) have committed to continuing to fund these programs,” Quinn said. “That changed last June or July and we were thrilled.”
LCHC provides women with OB-GYN doctors, a nurse case manager, and peer-recovery coaches through this program to help them through their substance-use treatment, prenatal care, meetings with therapists and psychiatrists, and addiction care.
“We really emphasize patients’ choices in this,” said Quinn. “Sometimes we’ll have a patient who says ‘I have a therapist I’ve already worked with for years’ and we’ll tell them to keep working with that person and we can do whatever else they want us to do.
“The great thing about the Moms Do Care program at LCHC is that we’re led by family physicians. I’m a family physician… so we also provide pediatric care, so for a large portion of our patients, once they deliver their babies, we’re also the caregivers for their babies so we’re able to do one visit, one place where you see mom and you see baby.”
Having the ability to see their doctor and therapist all in one location and have a nurse that they know coordinate all of this with a peer-recovery coach who supports them provides patients with a lot of wraparound care, Quinn said.
The access to all of these services in one place is something Quinn said the patients love.
“Knowing that when they come back in to see us and are going to that first pediatric visit with their newborn after just giving birth and recovering from all of that, knowing that they don’t have to meet a new person and explain their history of opioid-use disorder and their recovery process to someone new… is liberating,” Quinn said.
The program has between 80 to 90 women enrolled at a time. Women are enrolled for a year at a time and are given the option to re-enroll, if needed.
A large part of this program is the peer-recovery coach, which Quinn said has completely changed her medical practice and made her a better doctor because the peer-recovery coach engages well with patients, but also helps LCHC design its services in a way that is going to be accessible and supportive to the patients.
Latisha Goullaud is the lead peer-recovery coach and a peer mom for the Moms Do Care program.
In this role, Goullaud does recovery-coach work with the health center, where she helps other teams integrate recovery coaches onto their teams.
Goullaud is a mom of three who has struggled with substance-abuse disorder. As a peer mom, she said she is “somebody that can relate to the moms on a personal level.”
Goullaud helps the moms with navigating the Department of Children and Families (DCF) services; helps to connect them to recovery resources, meetings and support groups; does a lot of advocacy work; accompanies women to court; helps to prepare them for meetings with DCF; works with moms during and after their pregnancy in their recovery and/or helps them obtain medication for their addiction; and coordinates them with probation officers.
Goullaud got into this role because when she was pregnant with her daughter and actively using substances, she went to LCHC.
“I felt like all of the doctors were caring and compassionate and I didn’t feel judged,” Goullaud said.
She got into recovery at the end of her pregnancy, but had her daughter removed when she was born, because she checked into a residential-treatment program.
Goullaud was reunited with her daughter six months later, and has been sober for more than six years.
Shortly after giving birth, Goullaud got pregnant again, with twin boys, and went back to LCHC for OB-GYN care. She saw her previous doctor, who told her she was “proud and impressed” with how far she had come.
This doctor told Goullaud about the opening for a peer mom and recovery coach, and recommended her for the position.
“It’s really awesome to work on this team,” Goullaud said. “LCHC does a lot of great work to help out the pregnant moms in need.”
To learn more about the Moms Do Care program, visit www.lchcnet.org/services/moms-do-care.