National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB)

In support of National Influenza Vaccination Week (NIVW), the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB) partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Families Fighting Flu (FFF) to feature a two-part blog post on its updated website. The website receives 10,000 monthly views. The blog posts were promoted on the HMHB homepage as well as through various social media channels for HMHB, FFF and CDC. With a combined following of over 230,000 on Twitter and over 10,000 for Facebook, the organizations were able to work together to raise awareness about the importance of flu vaccination and maternal-child health (MCH). This success story is an example of how cross-collaborative partnerships can impact message dissemination. HMHB also included an overview of each post in its December 17, 2012 edition of the Monday Morning Memo, a weekly e-newsletter that shares maternal, child and family health resources, research and events with a mailing list of over 3,000 MCH professionals and parents.

For the December 5 blog, Dr. Karen Wong, Physician and Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer of the Influenza Division at CDC, shared with readers the importance of protecting pregnant mothers and their babies from flu. She highlighted that it’s not too late for flu vaccination and that millions of pregnant women have safely received flu shots for many years.

Laura Scott, Executive Director of Families Fighting Flu, followed up with a second blog on December 6 with three touching stories of families that lost their children to the flu. These stories, and others like them, help us better understand that even healthy children can suffer from the devastating effects of the flu. Laura emphasized the importance of protecting families from the flu by getting self and family members vaccinated every year.

For more information about the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB), visit www.hmhb.org.

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