Innovation to Incubation

The 2015 Institute of Medicine report Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation provided a blueprint for action to advance the early care and education workforce with a set of recommendations directed to stakeholders at local, state, and national levels. To facilitate implementation of the recommendations at the state level, the National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM’s) Innovation to Incubation program launched the B8 State Pathways to Implementation Project. Through this project, the NAM acts as a neutral convener for stakeholders interested in discussing the report’s recommendations and developing independent implementation plans.

As participants in the B8 State Pathways to Implementation Project, self-assembled state “teams” meet regularly over a period of 9 months to discuss challenges and opportunities for implementing the report’s recommendations in their specific state contexts. Participants learn from each other and from experts in the field to inform the development of tailored state action plans and generate strategies for stakeholder engagement. (Please note: Action plans and/or strategies resulting from this activity are the sole property of the individual participants and will not be published by the NAM. Action plans and/or strategies are not endorsed by and do not necessarily reflect the views of the participants’ organizations, the NAM, or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.)

So far, eight state and regional teams have participated in the B8 State Pathways to Implementation Project: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia, Washington State, and a regional team representing Maryland, Northern Virginia, and Washington, DC. For more information about the project, including how your state can participate, contact project director Kimber Bogard at kbogard@nas.edu.

The B8 State Pathways to Implementation Project is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Early Milestones Colorado, the McCormick Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Washington Area Women’s Foundation’s Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

Click here for report statistics, including how many downloads its had since its release.

Truncated Report Recommendations >> 

With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Academy of Medicine and Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education held two expert meetings to identify a set of activities to design a longitudinal birth cohort study across the life course. These meetings drew on The National Children’s Study 2014: An Assessment, which was a joint project of the Committee on National Statistics and the Board on Children, Youth, and Families. In addition to engaging a diverse array of stakeholders from academia, philanthropy, local communities, industry, and government, the meetings included discussions on how to design a national longitudinal cohort study that is multidisciplinary, focuses on the main drivers of health, engages communities, employs a diverse set of data sources, and includes innovative techniques in data analysis. The discussions included how to use the findings from such a study to improve and direct resources toward improvements in the drivers of health. The final product is a set of National Academy of Medicine Perspectives papers. The goal is to provide input into, and catalyze action for improvements in the design of future longitudinal birth cohort studies.

With funding from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, experts working in policy, practice, research, and philanthropy settings met to discuss data on foster care children including time to permanency and their health and well-being. In addition, key gaps in the research were discussed and potential policy solutions were highlighted to achieve more timely permanence. Potential directions for a consensus study were discussed. For more information, contact Natacha Blain at nblain@nas.edu.

As a follow up to several sessions at the board meeting of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, a series of NAM Perspectives papers are in development, addressing social justice and health equity from multiple disciplinary perspectives:

• Life Span and Legal/Policy Research as Dual Focuses for Identifying and Implementing Opportunities to Realize Health Equity
• Challenges and Promise of Health Equity for Native Hawaiians
• Expulsion and Suspension in Early Education as Matters of Social Justice and Health Equity
• Lessons for Health Equity: Military Medicine as a Window to Universal Health Insurance
• Health Inequities, Social Determinants, and Intersectionality 

Video: Social Justice and Health Equity across the Life Course, May 2015 Meeting

May 2015 Meeting Agenda >>