“We’ve seen incredible momentum on the issue of paid leave,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a District-based nonprofit. “Private sector companies are adopting new policies, and although two weeks falls way short of what working parents need, it’s a great start.”
Statement of Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families
The study, called Listening to Mothers III, was based on Childbirth Connection’s nationally representative survey of some 1,960 new mothers. It found that four out of five of the mothers who were warned they might have large babies gave birth to infants who were not large, and weighed less than 8 pounds 13 ounces.
GetMyHealthData Campaign Leaders Hopeful that Clarification Will Help Reduce Barriers that Prevent Patients from Accessing Their Health Data
Statement of Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families
“The guidance released yesterday is an important step forward in helping patients exercise their right to access their health information under HIPAA, including electronically. Our cadre of volunteer ‘tracer’ patients has found that, unfortunately, confusion surrounding HIPAA persists and often means that patients don’t get the kind of access to their health care information they need,” said the campaign’s coordinator Christine Bechtel.
Statement of Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families
More than 43 million Americans don’t have paid sick time, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families.
This NPR interview features National Partnership Vice President Vicki Shabo.
Individual families sharing their stories is the most important part of all of this—more important, even, than these companies’ policies. It’s these stories that are going to make a difference. You can start by sharing your story here with the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit fighting to make paid family and medical leave available for all working families.
In fact, employees have no legal requirement to tell their boss that they’re pregnant at all – although their changing bodies might eventually betray the news, says Sarah Fleisch Fink, senior policy counsel for workplace programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit, nonpartisan activist group.
According to a 2008 survey by the National Partnership for Women & Families, only 16 percent do — which just goes to show we’ve got a lot of work to do.
“When you don’t wait for labor to begin on its own, you cut short all kinds of physiological changes and preparations for birth that are taking place toward the end of pregnancy,” said Carol Sakala, the director of the nonprofit Childbirth Connection programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “What is the effect of cutting off those processes so casually on such a large scale?”
Exactly one week ago, the D.C. City Council held its first hearing on the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015, a proposal that would create a much-needed paid family and medical leave insurance program that would make paid leave accessible to virtually every worker in the District.
In new analysis conducted by the National Partnership for Women & Families, the 77¢ to the dollar figure is a median for all women collectively. “Pay inequities and wage discrimination perpetuate poverty, and women of color suffer the most,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership. “In the very states in which most African-American women and Latinas work, the loss of critical income makes it much harder for them and their families to get ahead or even stay afloat.”
Statement of Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families
“This kind of innovation is a positive and promising step toward a health care system that rewards value instead of volume and treats patients and families as partners in health care decision-making,” stated Debra L. Ness, President of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
Statement of Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families
“We could shift this number downward,” said Carol Sakala, director of childbirth connection programs at the National Partnership for Women and Families, by helping women get “fit and ready for the challenges of labor, using a doula, being upright and moving around during labor and periodic listening to the baby’s heart patterns as opposed to continuous electronic fetal monitoring.”
Kentucky has the right approach, said Christine Bechtel, a coordinator with the national campaign Get My Health Data, which is working to increase consumer demand for their own medical records. “It’s such an outdated view that patients should be charged for health data that is so essential to their care,” Bechtel said. “We have to shift the mentality around patient health information” so it’s no longer looked at as competitive information or a line item.