In the back room of Cleveland’s Mount Pleasant library branch Saturday, the vibes were high at a community baby shower.
Blue and purple balloons arched over platters of cupcakes as moms and moms-to-be tucked into plates of pasta and salad. Megan Thee Stallion grooved in the background. Toddlers pilfered cookies when their parents weren’t looking. Moms and dads could take home free diapers, wipes and baby clothes.
Shaffina Health, a new maternal healthcare practice, threw the baby shower, a celebration of about 60 moms and moms-to-be who registered. It was also an opportunity for the practice to educate families on the reality of being pregnant in the United States and in Cleveland — where the statistics are grim, especially for Black women. Black mothers in Ohio are 2.5 times more likely to die from a cause related to pregnancy or childbirth than white moms, according to state data.
“Despite the United States having all this world-class healthcare, we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation in the world,” Dr. Nicola Bomani Gonzalez, a consultant who works with Shaffina Health, told the crowd on Saturday. “…Has anybody heard in the news or from friends or family why the maternal mortality rates are so high?”
She shared a few reasons: Maternal health conditions, like high blood pressure at the end of a pregnancy. Pre-term labor. And racism.
“There are some doctors, unfortunately, who are not listening to us, who see us and don’t see us, who are blowing off our concerns,” Bomani Gonzalez said. “It’s your right to … have a doctor that’s listening to you, answering all of your questions.”
That’s what the newly established Shaffina Health hopes to be: a safe place for women to receive maternal healthcare. The two Black women who opened it — one doctor, one certified nurse midwife — say it’s a way to tackle the city’s maternal and infant mortality crisis through a unique mix of community programming and healthcare delivered at-home or virtually.
“The goal for us is not to become millionaires off of this practice,” said Dr. Munirah Bomani, a founder of Shaffina Health, and the sister of Bomani Gonzalez. “The goal is to identify gaps in care for women in our community who would trust medical professionals that look like them — and get them the services they need.”
The name Shaffina Health comes from the Arabic root word shaffa, which means to heal. Shaffina literally translates to ‘heal us,’ directed toward a woman, wrote Maqsooda Bryant, the practice’s other founder and a certified nurse midwife, in an email to Signal Cleveland.
In-home care to address maternal mortality
Bomani and Bryant both went to Cleveland’s public schools. Both were focused on medicine from a very young age — even when they weren’t always expected to be.
“When I was going to college, our guidance counselors were like, ‘You need to go to nursing school, because there’s no way you’re going to be accepted to medical school,’” Bomani said.
She was.
The two grew close while working night shifts at MetroHealth, Bomani as a family medicine resident and Bryant as a NICU nurse. They would take 3 a.m. “lunch breaks” together, discussing the barriers to healthcare their community faced. That ranged from communication challenges — patients often struggled to understand information medical staff shared with them — to transportation. After giving birth at a hospital, women are typically asked to return days later with their baby for a check up.
“If you can’t walk, if you don’t have a car, if you don’t have money, how are you gonna come back in two to three days?” Bryant said.
The two women realized they could address those challenges with a practice of their own.
“We want to do the postpartum visits, the newborn visits, and the lactation visits in their homes,” Bryant said. “They don’t have to leave their house.”
The practice offers a slate of other services, too, such as help creating a birth plan or breastfeeding consultations. Residents can choose to be seen virtually or in-person.
Another unique facet of Shaffina Health: each service is priced on their website. A single postpartum visit, for example, is $200. The practice accepts nearly all types of insurance, including Medicaid.
“We want people to know because people are making budgets,” Bomani said. “… So these are the prices. This is the care that you can get. You know exactly what services we’re offering.”
Involving the community
Bryant said that Shaffina Health’s work to address maternal mortality rates isn’t limited to one-on-one work with mothers. The practice also plans to expand on the work it started at the community baby shower.
Over the next six months, Shaffina Health will host a series of meet-ups in Mount Pleasant to educate moms-to-be about health and wellness. Compared to the rest of the city, the neighborhood often falls in the lower half of maternal and child health indicators, like moms getting pre-natal care or infants having low birth weights. It’s also where Bryant grew up.
The meetings will discuss everything from healthy pregnancies and mental health postpartum to how to build a support network. Bryant said she hopes the events create bonds between the moms and moms-to-be, so that they have a network within the same neighborhood that they can lean on.
The work Shaffina Health is doing to improve healthcare and build community among pregnant moms is vital, said Darian Carter, who attended the community baby shower on Saturday with her 10-year-old daughter. Carter, who is due to have another baby early next year, said she already attends a separate group meet-up with pregnant women. It’s been a huge help through her second pregnancy, she said.
She’s been a bundle of nerves, because her 10-year-old was born months early. During that pregnancy, her midwife was at first skeptical when Carter told her that she was feeling immense pain at 26 weeks. She instructed Carter to stay in the bath for an hour and then check in.
“In an hour, it was horrible,” Carter said. “Called her, she still didn’t believe me. And I just happened to have a contraction on the phone.”
Her midwife finally told her to get to the hospital, where Carter’s daughter was born within an hour.
Carter said the pregnancy support group and events like the community baby shower — and a close relationship with her sister — are all helping her through her second pregnancy.
“With him, I’ve been kinda nervous because I just turned 27 weeks,” Carter said of the baby. “And we made it!”