Ensure your patients and their newborns have a health care home. The Bridges for Newborns (Bridges) program helps link newborns with health care coverage and ensures they receive their first well-baby checkup and have up-to-date immunizations. Families receive the Kit for New Parents and information on the benefits of breastfeeding.

Committed to providing a healthy start to newborns, Bridges is a network of Orange County hospitals, family resource centers, and community agencies working with the California Children and Families Commission of Orange County.

What to Do When Your Child Gets Sick is part of the Orange County Kit for New Parents, distributed free at participating hospitals through the Bridges program. Studies show parent education and awareness gained from the book reduced unnecessary trips to the ER by 58 percent and unnecessary clinic visits by 42 percent.

According to the study, parents also benefit by becoming more educated about their children’s health and missing fewer work days (a 42 percent decrease) and fewer school days (29 percent decrease) for their children.*

Program Benefits

• Increases parent knowledge about children’s health
• Reduces unnecessary trips to the ER and clinic
• Enlarges the continuum of care for patients ranging from the hospital to services after discharge
• Helps decrease unnecessary emergency room visits by worried parents.
• Assists social work departments and nursing staff with case management and psychosocial needs assessments
• Provides community awareness and highlights the hospital’s support for women who deliver or plan to deliver at their facility

How It Works

• Participating hospitals screen mothers with newborns to identify factors that may prevent the newborn from thriving. Families with identified risk factors are referred to community or hospital-based service providers for ongoing follow up, including home visitation.
• Case managers then conduct an extensive assessment of these families and work with the parents to access health care and encourage establishing a health care home, identify specific barriers, and help them develop practices that support normal growth and development.
• Case managers refer families with more extensive and complex needs to appropriate community resources.

HASC co-manages Bridges with Orangewood Children’s Foundation, to help:

• Set protocol and guidelines for best practices.
• Monitor program activities.
• Coordinate data collection and reporting.
• Establish referral relationships with community-based organizations.
• Facilitate continuing education for staff.
• Manage distribution of the Kit for New Parents.
• Provide ongoing day-to-day support to participating hospitals.

Program Funding

Bridges for Newborns is funded in part by Proposition 10 Tobacco Tax revenues and managed by the Commission on a renewable basis. Funding is also provided by a grant from First 5 California. There is no fee for participating hospitals.

For more information, please contact Ana Reza.