COLUMBUS, Ohio – Measuring success just a year into a community effort to prevent infant deaths is tricky.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
The rates don’t plummet overnight, and there’s some lag in collecting the data. The most current numbers still show that Franklin County families lose about 150 babies a year.
Data available for this year that runs through April shows 50 babies died before they reached their first birthdays, leading to an infant mortality rate of 8.3 per 1,000 — far above the goal rate of 6.
Babies born in some parts of Columbus die at rates the nation as a whole hasn’t seen in five decades.
Those charged with leading the CelebrateOne project to lower infant death rates here say they trust in new efforts and plans to help them reduce infant mortality by 40 percent (from 9.8 per 1,000 live births in 2011 to the national average of 6) and cut in half the disparity in death rates between black and white infants by 2020.
A year after the conclusion of a series of meetings by the Greater Columbus Infant Mortality Task Force, CelebrateOne director Liane Egle and other leaders discussed progress and plans at the Neighborhood House on Atcheson Street on the Near East Side Monday morning.
“It’s going to be a while before we can definitively say the rate is going down,” Egle said after the event. “We kind of have to have faith in the things we’re putting in place.
“There is a lot of effort to try to keep up the momentum.”