Purpose
This document seeks to summarize the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program’s impacts on four aspects of health, such as care costs, birth outcomes, infant feeding, and immunization rates. The WIC’s purpose involves safeguarding the health of low-income pregnant and breastfeeding women and their children. Efforts to achieve it include providing food checks for eligible participants, offering education pertaining to child nutrition, and facilitating participants’ access to healthcare services, such as immunization (Florida Health, 2022). Based on the analysis, the document proposes recommendations to improve the WIC program’s effectiveness in Florida and the Orlando area.
Problem and Problem Analysis
The problem that needs addressing refers to improving the WIC program’s ability to achieve its stated goals across various levels. In the context of the federal program, the available room for improvement has existed as a crucial issue for decades. Constant improvements resulted in changes to food packages and healthcare services offered to the eligible participants (Di et al., 2018; Food Research and Action Center [FRAC], 2021). The evaluations of the program’s impact across various levels can support the identification of deficiencies affecting the WIC-eligible populations in Florida and the Orlando area.
Regarding the aspects that can be improved or changed, the analysis of the WIC’s impacts on birth outcomes, healthcare expenses for program participants, infant feeding, and immunization rates facilitates the identification of the program’s deficiencies. Aside from demonstrating the key improvement areas, the planned analysis can promote meaningful recommendations for change that are not linked with the program’s components and related services. In some circumstances, the WIC program’s insufficient impacts on mothers’ and children’s health might stem from suboptimal program utilization rates and state or local agencies’ inability to reach all eligible individuals. As an example, despite the recent 2,1% increase in participation in the WIC program at the national level, Florida has experienced a 1,9% decrease in service utilization (FRAC, 2021). The findings reported below demonstrate two central improvement areas, including increasing WIC participation rates in Florida and considering new strategies to promote exclusive breastfeeding in racial minority women.
Results of Analysis: The WIC Program’s Impacts
Research Methods and Resources’ Credibility
The WIC’s overall impacts on the U.S., State of Florida, and the Orlando area/Orange County have been researched with the use of literature review methods, including database and Internet search. The findings were then grouped according to the health outcome. The used resources’ quality and credibility were ascertained by limiting the range of applicable document types. The appropriate source types included scholarly research, government-funded research, and information from healthcare authorities. Opinions and individual-level experiences with the WIC program were not included in the analysis.
Birth Outcomes
- National: WIC participation promotes reductions in premature births, fetal death cases, and iron deficiency anemia in newborns (Blakeney et al., 2020).
- WIC enrollees’ risks of giving birth to newborns with an extremely low weight are reduced (Blakeney et al., 2020).
- State/local: in Florida and Orlando, WIC enrolment reduces Black-White disparities in delivering children weighing less than 2,5 kg (Blakeney et al., 2020).
- In Florida cities, mothers’ WIC enrollment increases children’s birth weight by at least 53g compared to non-participating women and addresses disparities between young and older mothers (Blakeney et al., 2020).
Healthcare Costs
- National: WIC participation leads to savings in care costs by promoting timely immunizations and preventing the incidence of low birth weight, pre-term delivery, and iron deficiency in newborns (Rada, 2018).
- State/local: in Florida and Orange County, WIC participation rates are 51% and 63%, respectively, which can decrease the program’s impacts on health outcomes and healthcare costs (Huddleston, 2020).
Infant Feeding Practices
- National: Based on the NATFAN survey, 2009 revisions to the WIC breastfeeding packages significantly increased the use of fully breastfeeding food (FBF) packages (Di et al., 2018).
- FBFs remain underutilized in Hispanic women and those with low educational attainment, so promoting exclusive breastfeeding and WIC participation in these categories remains a priority (Di et al., 2018).
- State/local: the WIC center in Orlando offers comprehensive infant feeding education to mothers (WIC Programs, n.d.).
- In Florida, the majority of WIC participants with children younger than five months choose full breastfeeding or full formula packages rather than partial breastfeeding (Di et al., 2018).
Child Immunization Rates
- National: within the first year of life, WIC participation increases the child’s probability of getting vaccines by 1,4% (Bersak & Sonchak, 2018).
- WIC-eligible and participating children follow recommended schedules more closely than WIC-eligible non-participants (Bersak & Sonchak, 2018).
- State/local: WIC participation improves immunization rates in Florida, including the Orlando area (Thomas et al., 2014).
- In Florida cities, differences in vaccination coverage between WIC-eligible and non-eligible children are lower compared to Minnesota, Hawaii, Georgia, and Nebraska (Thomas et al., 2014).
- Orlando’s WIC center offers healthcare referral services, including immunization (WIC Programs, n.d.).
Recommended Course of Action
Recommendations to Improve the WIC’s Influences
- Increase eligible families’ participation in the WIC program in Florida and the Orlando area.
- Popularize exclusive breastfeeding among WIC-eligible Hispanic women in Florida.
Achieving the Recommendations: Possible Actions and How They Can Help
- Use social media platforms and community events to facilitate Florida families’ access to information regarding eligibility for the WIC benefits.
- Resolving eligibility-related misconceptions among WIC-eligible families can support participation (FRAC, 2019).
- Create culturally responsive handouts for WIC-eligible minority women to explain the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding for children’s health outcomes.
Being the recommended practice for infants younger than six months, exclusive breastfeeding can further improve WIC-participating children’s health (Pérez-Escamilla et al., 2019).
References
Bersak, T., & Sonchak, L. (2018). The impact of WIC on infant immunizations and health care utilization. Health Services Research, 53, 2952-2969. Web.
Blakeney, E. L., Herting, J. R., Zierler, B. K., & Bekemeier, B. (2020). The effect of women, infant, and children (WIC) services on birth weight before and during the 2007–2009 great recession in Washington state and Florida: A pooled cross-sectional time series analysis.BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 20(1), 1-13. Web.
Di, H., Ishdorj, A., & McKyer, L. (2018). Infant feeding practices: The impact of WIC policy changes on rural and urban participants.The Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, 1-17. Web.
Florida Health. (2022). WIC program information. Web.
Food Research and Action Center. (2019). Making WIC work better: Strategies to reach more women and children and strengthen benefits use. Web.
Food Research and Action Center. (2021). One year of WIC during COVID-19: Waivers are vital to participation and benefit redemption. Web.
Huddleston, C. (2020). Declining participation in Florida’s WIC program: Strategic planning needed to reverse the downward spiral. Florida Policy Institute. Web.
Pérez-Escamilla, R., Buccini, G. S., Segura-Pérez, S., & Piwoz, E. (2019). Perspective: Should exclusive breastfeeding still be recommended for 6 months?Advances in Nutrition, 10(6), 931-943. Web.
Rada, R. (2018). WIC as a public health intervention. Web.
Thomas, T. N., Kolasa, M. S., Zhang, F., & Shefer, A. M. (2014). Assessing immunization interventions in the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 47(5), 624-628. Web.
WIC Programs. (n.d.). Orlando WIC and nutrition services center. Web.