Grace Advertising & Consulting, Inc.

accessHealthNews.net PAGE 15 May 2019 Health Care Collaborative of Rural Missouri (HCC) has hired a new director of human resources: Brook Balentine. She came on board at the end of January and spent the past few weeks visiting various HCC locations, and getting to know staff members she'll be serving in her new role. "It's a great organization. They do a lot of amazing work," she said. "I'm trying to absorb as much as I can, learning about the team and how I can best be a part of it." She recognizes how intimately people, including HCC's employees, are connected to technology whether through a laptop, an iPad, a cellphone, or whatever the case may be. "It's important to make sure we have the right HR database, and everything is automated," she noted. "Even things as simple as checking your paystub will be online now." Since she grew up in a small town in southeastern Kansas, Balentine understands firsthand the value of quality rural health care. "It's very important for everybody to have access to the right health care. I'm learning about our network and how we try to help improve every aspect of a person's health. HCC has great providers and is a good fit with communities." Absorbing the lingo related to clinics and medicine is part of her learning curve. "But many of the services we try to help people with, I'm very familiar with," she said. Balentine spent more than a decade on Claire McCaskill's staff, starting with the former Missouri senator's 2004 gubernatorial race. McCaskill lost her run for governor, but soon turned her eyes toward Washington. "I started working on her senate campaign in August 2005," Balentine said. "After we won in November 2006, Senator McCaskill asked me, 'So you're going to D.C., right?' And I said, 'Yeah! Of course, I am!'" Over the next year or so, Balentine performed HR duties in the nation's capital to help get McCaskill's D.C. office up and running. "We had a sort of mantra in Senator McCaskill's office: 'If you're really happy in your role, then you can do really great things.' Even though I worked for someone who represented a certain party, we didn't operate along political lines." Instead, the goal was making sure staff and constituents received the resources they needed. In 2008, a field representative position opened in McCaskill's Kansas City office. The successful candidate would be responsible for 30 northwest Missouri counties, including Lafayette. Excited by the prospect of working more closely with the public, Balentine took the position, packed her bags, and headed back to the Midwest. Her passion for helping underserved communities receive the resources they need fired Balentine's drive to help rural residents navigate government-sponsored programs. She also assisted nonprofits in finding grants or other funding opportunities to help build their organizations. "We did all kinds of different things, whether it was working with an area agency on aging, or various municipalities on water projects, or the USDA on rural development," she said. "My role changed over time, and I worked my way up until I was running the office that last year." McCaskill lost her senate seat in the November 2018 election. "Though the results weren't what I had hoped, I think it's all worked out very well. I'm extremely happy to be where I am now, with new challenges." Balentine's extensive experience in hiring, office management, training, and professional development—as well as her savvy working with governmental entities—should dovetail well with HCC's New HR Director Brings Expertise from Nation's Capital By Cheryl Gochnauer, Contributing Writer HCC's mission to Cultivate partnerships and deliver quality health care to strengthen rural communities. "Having some knowledge about how government systems operate, I think, is going to be very useful to this organization and to the patients we serve," she said. "The tie between what I did before and what I'm doing now is this: I can make the connections. I would have constituents call into my previous office and we would do all we could to try and connect them with the right resources. That's very similar to the work that's done here. Constituent services, patient services—it's all figuring out how to help people where they are." Any possibility her new position will ever take her to Jefferson City, advocating for rural health issues? "I don't know. I don't believe that policy or that political hat will ever really go away for me," Balentine said. "But for now, my focus is making sure our HCC employees have everything they need for things to go smoothly. I'm so grateful to be here and excited for this opportunity." Almost 70% of babies who died from sleep-related suffocation between 2011 and 2014 did so because of soft bedding, a new study reveals. The finding underscores physicians' urgent message to new parents that babies should sleep only in cribs or bassinets free of blankets, toys and other potential hazards. Unintentional suffocation is the No. 1 cause of injury death in babies less than a year old in the United States, with more than 80% of cases occurring in bed. The new study, from a University of Virginia Health System physician and her colleagues, sheds light on how that is happening, revealing that soft bedding is responsible for the vast majority of sleep-related infant deaths (69%). The second most common cause was due to overlay by another person (19%), with 71% of these occurring while sleeping in the same bed with a parent and/or sibling. The third most common was "wedging," in which babies become trapped between two objects, such as a mattress and wall (12%). "These results are very significant, because these deaths – clearly due to suffocation – were all preventable" said UVA's Fern Hauck, MD. "It is also important to note that the causes of suffocation differed by infant age. So, overlaying is a bigger problem for the youngest infants, soft bedding affects infants most commonly under 4 months, and wedging more a problem when infants are older and can move around in bed." Unsafe Infant Sleep Practices Sleep-related suffocation and strangulation was responsible for 14% of all sudden, unexpected infant deaths during the period reviewed, the researchers determined. Death by soft bedding was most likely to occur in an adult bed, with the babies on their backs. Most often, the suffocation or strangulation was caused by a blanket or blankets. When babies died of overlay, it was most often the mother who overlaid the infants. In wedging deaths, babies were most likely to become trapped between the mattress and a wall. "Keeping infants safe is a priority for parents, and these types of suffocation deaths can be prevented by following the American Academy of Pediatrics safe sleep guidelines," Hauck said. "These include: placing infants to sleep in a safety-approved bassinet or crib in the caregivers' room; not placing infants alone or with others on adult beds to sleep; keeping all soft objects out of the infant's sleep area, including blankets and pillows (wearable blankets are preferred over loose blankets); and placing infants on their back to sleep." In conducting the study, the researchers reviewed more than 1,800 infant deaths classified as suffocation in the Centers for Disease Control's national Sudden Unexpected Infant Death Case Registry. The deaths occurred between 2011 and 2014, the most recent year for which data was available. All the babies were less than a year old. Findings Published The new study has been published in the scientific journal Pediatrics. The research team consisted of Alexa B. Erck Lambert, Sharyn E. Parks, Carri Cottengim, Meghan Faulkner, Hauck and Carrie K. Shapiro-Mendoza. Erck Lambert was supported by a contract between DB Consulting Group and the Division of Reproductive Health at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, Faulkner's employer, the Michigan Public Health Institute, received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to support the SUID Case Registry. To keep up with the latest medical research news from UVA, subscribe to the Making of Medicine blog at http://makingofmedicine.virginia.edu. Soft Bedding Poses Grave Danger to Sleeping Babies, Study Shows Bedding Caused Almost 70% of Sleep-Related Suffocation Deaths

• Cover