The waiting room at the Village of Healing’s clinic is buzzing with warm laughter, as a young family arrives for an appointment.
A nurse remarks that Euclid resident Shalon Salters looks tired walking in, carrying her sleeping 4-month-old baby, Zarah.
But by the appointment's end, Salters’ glazed expression had changed. She was upbeat.
“Today I went first," Salters said. "I met with Aubrey and I talked to her about my concerns, personally, what is (going on) mentally, and also physically, and just following up on some things from last appointment."
Not only did Salters get a wellness check for her baby, but she had her health checked out, too. It’s a new model, which allows child care or transportation-strapped moms to get the care they need.
A new approach to postpartum care
This kind of appointment, where both a pediatric specialist and adult primary care specialist coordinate on care, is a atypical for most new moms. But it's not unusual for moms who come to the Village of Healing Center— a culturally-sensitive care clinic, where Black providers care for Black men, women and children with primary care, pediatrics, OB/GYN and mental health services. The clinic has operated in Euclid since 2019.
Some studies show these kinds of clinics often have better outcomes because patients feel like their doctor understands their culture, and they are more likely open up about their health concerns.
Salters likes the format, and said the care she’s received at Village of Healing after her second birth compared to her postpartum care at a different health system after her first has been night and day.
“I've had a lot of different things happen to me post having my daughter," she said. "So for me, (at Village of Healing) it's like I'm not getting lost in the shuffle of, 'Oh, yeah, you had the baby, let's focus on baby.' Because I was a star of the show, now she's the star. No, in this model, we're both the stars.”
Combating a crisis through compassion
Maternal mortality rates for Black women are high locally, and in Ohio—where in 2019 nearly 60 Black women died per 10,0000 live births—far more than any other ethnic group.
Those stats inspired co-founder Da'na Langford, a trained nurse-midwife, to open the health center. She said she saw firsthand how the system is stacked against Black women, whose concerns about health issues are often minimized.
“'I hear you got a headache. You're just tired. The baby's been up. The baby's been crying,'" Langford said. "Now we have preeclampsia, severe preeclampsia or cardiomyopathy... Over 70% of Black women go undiagnosed with mental health [concerns]. So when they're saying their depression symptoms, which sound different than other races, they're ignored."
Langford said she was further motivated to offer alternative options to her Black patients because of a history of American medicine that builds off the suffering of Black women — from enslaved women who were experimented on for the study of modern gynecology, to Black midwives being pushed aside by hospital-based deliveries.
“At some point, somebody in my family said don't trust, and it's because it was passed down from generation to generation because of that first initial history," she said. "What we're doing here is we're acknowledging it, and that's where the other systems mess up. We're acknowledging it and we're acknowledging it in our own experiences.”
Regaining trust
Joyce Fitzpatrick, chair of nursing at Case Western Reserve University, said she hopes community-based nonprofit health care centers take off in other places.
“We have to have a model that's culturally sensitive and is delivered by individuals who are like me," she said. "That's a challenge in in our health care profession, that we don't have enough providers who are like the people they serve.”
Meanwhile, patients like Salters are finding comfort in that approach at the Village of Healing — in Salters’ case after visiting three different providers that weren’t a good fit.
“Coming here made me feel like I could get the answers to my questions, my partner's asking questions, they're listening to him as well," she said. "So we just felt supported, and I wanted to be heard versus silenced.”
More Black women and families can get care through the Village of Healing. The Center just opened a second location in Cleveland's Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood, and has plans to open an additional heath center in Youngstown by the end of the year.
