HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Improved care for babies born after being exposed to drugs in the womb and their mothers is the goal of the ongoing push from 3rd District Congressman Evan Jenkins (R-W.Va.) to see best practices, some developed in West Virginia, implemented.
On Wednesday, Jenkins was in Huntington to announce he had a letter from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials committing fully to the implementation of recommendations from the “Protecting Our Infants Act: Final Strategy.”
“This is developing a best strategy for individual patients and babies,” Jenkins said.
The 39 recommendations were originally suggested without timelines and cover prevention, treatment and related services for NAS, neonatal abstinence syndrome, along with additional effects of prenatal opioid and other drug exposure including the following:
– promoting non-pharmacologic treatment, like rooming-in;
– providing continuing medical education to health care providers for managing and treating infants with NAS, such as on NAS treatment protocols;
– conducting research on the long-term effects of prenatal drug exposure so that appropriate services can be developed for infants with NAS;
– and establishing clear definitions of NAS and standardizing the use of diagnosis codes to collect more useful data on it.
“It doesn’t force everybody into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ because, candidly, no baby is exactly like any other baby and the drug exposure of one child would be very different from another child, based on what drugs the mother took,” Jenkins explained.
“Mothers are in different situations themselves.”
An Oct. 2017 Government Accountability Office report on the need for implementation is available HERE.
“We did not just want another strategy or plan sitting on the shelf gathering dust,” Jenkins told MetroNews in a phone interview following Wednesday’s event.
To try to force that, Jenkins previously introduced the Protecting NAS Babies Act on Capitol Hill.
With that pending, he welcomed the new commitment from HHS.
In the coming months, Jenkins said a network of federal officials would be working on ways to put the recommendations into use at local levels by determining the next steps, possibly as soon as this fall.
“We’ve come a long way from just developing a report that says, ‘Here are steps that should be taken,’ to getting federal officials to make it a priority in saying, ‘Okay, we are going to actually make sure that these strategies get put into action.'”
Alongside Jenkins on Wednesday were Kevin Fowler, president and CEO of Cabell Huntington Hospital, Marshall University President Jerome Gilbert and Dr. Sean Loudin, neonatalogist and Lily’s Place medical director.
“This has been a labor of love for so many who have been on the front lines to care for these precious babies,” he said.
“I thank HHS for following the recommendations in my legislation and working with us to help the most innocent victims of the drug crisis.”