Nurses for Newborns assists families in 30 Tennessee counties. And as of today, its founder is the winner of a national award for social innovation.
The Civic Ventures Purpose Prize celebrates people over the age of 60 who’ve devoted the second half of their lives to finding solutions to community problems.
Recipient Sharon Rohrbach worked for sixteen years as a neo-natal nurse in St. Louis. When the standard hospital stay after a delivery shrank down just 24 hours, Rohrbach says she saw too many of her patients return to the hospital.
“We started seeing babies come back to the emergency room, and many babies were actually dying. They were dying of preventable causes.”
Rohrbach saw there was a great need for teaching basic baby care and parenting skills. So she started Nurses for Newborns out of a spare bedroom in her home. It now serves more than 6-thousand families a year in Missouri and Tennessee.
At-risk families who are referred by hospital staff receive home visits soon after their babies are born. And there are also special long-term programs for teen parents, mothers with mental or physical disabilities, and babies who started out their lives in intensive care. Everything is free to the families.
While the program’s techniques were designed to reduce infant mortality rates, Rohrbach says they’ve also proved to dramatically reduce the chances of mental and physical abuse. According to her tracking of state records, less than one percent of Nurses for Newborns’ patients become victims of reported abuse.
Nurses for Newsborns’ got it start in Tennessee in 2001, thanks to former Tennessee Titan Fred Miller and his wife Kim.
Rohrbach says she’ll use the 100-thousand dollar Purpose Prize to expand the program into other states.
WEB EXTRA:
Nurses for Newborns operates in Middle Tennessee because of an NFL trade. Pro football player Fred Miller and his wife, a nurse, became supporters of Nurses for Newborns during his time with the St. Louis Rams. When he moved to Nashville to play for the Titans, Miller gave
$1.5 million dollars to establish a Nashville office for the organization. Nurses for Newborns currently works with families in 29 Missouri counties and 30 Tennessee counties.
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