A new report indicates that the teen pregnancy rate in Boston is declining, along with the overall percentage of preterm births. The report by the Boston Public Health Commission also shows that the infant mortality rate for black infants has declined in recent years.
Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission credits the city’s aggressive outreach campaigns with local communities, as well as adopting a peer-leadership model in the last five years.
“We’ve spent a lot more time training young people to themselves to be leaders around their own health, and then explaining issues related to health to their peers,” Ferrer said. “So, using a peer leadership model is accounting for some of the successes here.”
The Health of Boston report also indicates there are significant health disparities, particularly obesity, between black and white residents, and this is something Ferrer said the city needs to address better.
“We need to really look at what’s happening in the neighborhoods, what opportunities are there for people to both be physically active, and to eat well,” Ferrer said. “And that’s something that I think we’ll be working on for the next decade, to be honest. I think we will make significant progress when we couple the traditional approach that we use, which is to focus on individual behavior, when we couple that with improving the environment, and making sure that people have good access to the things they need to be healthy -- I think we’ll start seeing a change there.”
Ferrer said the report has always been an important tool for developing public health policies and for determining how the public health commission allocates resources.
Read the Health of Boston report here.
