Evaluation report
Project Nurture Integrates Care And Services To Improve Outcomes For Opioid-Dependent Mothers And Their Children
Kenneth John McConnell, Menolly R. Kaufman, Jenny I. Grunditz, Helen Bellanca, Amanda L. Risser et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001Project Nurture is an integrated care model in Portland, Oregon that combines maternity care, substance use treatment, and social service coordination for opioid-dependent mothers on Medicaid. The program reduced child maltreatment and foster care placement while increasing prenatal visits and maternal hospital stays compared to similar mothers in areas without the program. The results show that coordinating health and human services can improve outcomes for vulnerable mothers and children, though challenges remain in sustaining the model across sectors.
Key points
- Project Nurture reduced child maltreatment among opioid-dependent mothers in the treatment group
- Foster care placement of children was reduced in the treatment group
- Prenatal visits increased among mothers in Project Nurture
- Maternal lengths of hospital stay increased in the treatment group
- Coordination between health care and human services sectors improved outcomes despite cross-sector sustainability challenges
Limitations
The document does not provide specific numerical results or effect sizes for the outcomes measured. It also does not describe the study duration, sample sizes, or potential confounding factors that might explain differences between treatment and comparison groups.
Abstract
Children born to women with substance use disorders are at high risk for early foster care placement, which is associated with long-term adverse outcomes for children and places additional pressure on state budgets. Poor outcomes for drug-dependent mothers and their children may be further exacerbated by a lack of coordination between the health care and human services sectors. Project Nurture is an innovative model in Portland, Oregon, that integrates maternity care, substance use treatment, and social service coordination for Medicaid beneficiaries. This study assessed the impact of Project Nurture on a range of patient and child welfare outcomes. Among the "treatment" population of opioid-dependent women enrolled in Medicaid, Project Nurture was associated with reductions in child maltreatment, placement of children in foster care, and increases in both prenatal visits and maternal lengths-of-stay in the hospital, compared to opioid-dependent women enrolled in Medicaid in Oregon counties not served by the project. These results suggest that models based in a clinical setting that engage the human services sector may improve overall outcomes, even though the difficulty in sharing savings across sectors presents challenges to sustainability.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Project Nurture integrated maternity care, substance use treatment, and social service coordination for Medicaid-eligible opioid-dependent women
- Population
- Opioid-dependent women enrolled in Medicaid in Portland, Oregon
Key finding
Reductions in child maltreatment in treatment group