The University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, partnering with a consortium of community organizations, will partly model the venture after a groundbreaking New York City program that has cut infant mortality in a 1,500-unit Harlem high-rise housing project from 27.7 to 6.1 deaths per 1,000 live births over a decade ending in 2008.
Like the Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership, the Wisconsin effort is “based on the assumption that the problem of African-American infant mortality extends back through the entire life course of African-American females,” said Dr. Philip Farrell, a semi-retired neonatologist, former University of Wisconsin medical school dean and co-chairman of the Lifecourse Initiative for Healthy Families steering committee.
