Program Helps Reduce Risky Pregnancies

Carmen Laurian came a long way to get help from the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center Foundation.

“When she met us, she was kind of very desperate,” said Jacqueline Esquef-Nederlk, director of programs for the foundation.

As a needy expectant mother, Laurian was the kind of woman that Dr. Vena Ricketts had hoped to help when the Healthy Beginnings program began in 1991. Ricketts, an emergency room physician for 17 years at Olive View, had too often seen women in high-risk pregnancies who had no prenatal care show up in the emergency room in labor.

“A lot of these women don’t like to come to the hospital,” said Ricketts, who recently finished a three-year term as president of the foundation.

The foundation created the Healthy Beginnings program to give expectant women the training to take care of themselves during pregnancy, and care for the child in its first year of life. Healthy Beginnings has helped reduce the numbers of women about to give birth that Ricketts sees in the emergency room.

But in the case of Laurian, the program offered her even more help.

Teachers at the six-week prenatal classes at the Vaughn Family Center in Pacoima brought Laurian to Esquef-Nederlk’s attention. “She was lost,” Esquef-Nederlk said. “She didn’t know where she was.”

When Laurian became pregnant, she was living with her husband and four children in a mountainside cardboard hut in Mexico. Doctors there told her that the baby would not survive unless it was born in the United States. The family walked for three months just to get to the border.

Esquef-Nederlk met Laurian in April 1996, shortly after she had given birth to a one-pound premature baby boy at Valley Presbyterian Hospital. Teachers from Healthy Beginnings had taught her about breast-feeding, proper nutrition and how to give medicine to the baby. Esquef-Nederlk showed the mother how to find the post office and Laundromat, got donations from local churches so the family could get an apartment, and helped get her husband a manufacturing job.

Today the baby is healthy. “Now, he’s 20 pounds and sitting right in front of me,” Esquef-Nederlk said. For Laurian, the baby was a godsend.

“She just thinks he was her little angel who came to protect her and get her out of the situation she was in,” Esquef-Nederlk said as she translated for Laurian, who speaks only Spanish.

When the foundation was created 10 years ago, the idea was to help the hospital meet the needs of the community, said Beverly Froelich, its executive director. And while they had created other programs--aimed at youth, cancer awareness, poison prevention and earthquake preparedness, for example--it is Healthy Beginnings that has made a difference, she said.

“It helped us focus--not only ourselves, but the community--on what was important,” Froelich said.

And it helped give the teachers of the classes--called promotoras--a focus in their lives as well, said Ricketts, who remembers the first graduation for the promotoras. “One said she felt going through the program has changed her life,” Ricketts said. “Another said this was the first graduation in her family, ever.”

In recognition of Healthy Beginnings, the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center Foundation recently won a Community Partnership Award from the Los Angeles Times Valley and Ventura County Editions.

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