A new approach to women’s health and wellness | Health Care

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Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day in March make this an ideal time to consider recent and upcoming changes to the women’s health care environment in Rochester.

Woman-centered comprehensive care
At every stage of life and across the continuum of care, women benefit when their care providers understand the particular needs of women—from understanding menopause to the ways conditions like heart disease manifest in women. What’s more, women thrive when their care environment is welcoming, uplifting, and supportive of the whole person.

At Rochester Regional, we are making historic strides in this area. On March 11, we opened the Women’s Health & Wellness Center in Pittsford, a first for the Rochester community: a center that brings together medical care and wellness services designed especially for women. Within its four walls are a wide range of medical services—including primary care, gynecology, cardiology, and behavioral health. The center intends to focus on preventative health and wellness and the question of how to help women thrive at every age. Future wellness offerings will be focused on the topics women using the center bring to us, including how do we optimize food and nutrition to promote wellness, navigating menopause, what physical activity is best for each individual, and what meditation is right for me? Health and wellness go hand in hand to create vitality and we want to co-create this new way of approaching wellness care with our community.

The care navigator
One of the most exciting innovations of the Women’s Health & Wellness Center is the introduction of the care navigator. These special coordinators work one-on-one with patients to synchronize onsite services and also to arrange any additional care needed throughout Rochester Regional’s clinically and operationally integrated network of hospitals and specialty practices. This reach across the entire continuum of care is ensures comprehensive, coordinated, whole-person care at every stage of life.

Destination campuses bring care close to home
The Women’s Health & Wellness Center is part of Rochester Regional’s destination-campus strategy to bring local access to care for all the communities we serve—rural, urban, and suburban. Over the past several years, we’ve opened destination campuses in Geneseo, Henrietta, Geneva, Batavia—and now Pittsford. A destination campus is a multi-service facility that offers a range of primary and specialty care services under one roof. It’s all about convenient access to high-quality care. The rise of virtual care also expands access, easing barriers of travel time, wait time, and the inconvenience of in-person visits.

Eliminating care disparities
Next month is National Minority Health Month. Black Maternal Health Week is April 11-17. Common Ground Health reports that in the Finger Lakes region, life-threatening delivery complications and serious maternal illnesses are 50% more frequent among Black women compared to White women. In Monroe County, the Black infant mortality rate is more than three times the rate for White infants.

The Monroe County Joint Community Health Needs Assessment—a collaborative effort of our local health systems, Common Ground Health, and the Monroe County Department of Public Health, has identified the No. 1 goal for 2022-2024: “Promote healthy women, infants, and children.” The top objective is to “reduce racial, ethnic, economic, and geographic disparities in maternal and child health outcomes, and promote health equity for maternal and child populations.”

Next month’s Health Care column will take a deeper look at local solutions supporting the urgent goal of improving our community’s maternal-health outcomes. Women’s health care in Rochester means caring for all women at all stages of life—and this is a time for creative new approaches on every front.

Elizabeth Bostock, MD, is Rochester Regional Health’s Executive Medical Director for Women’s Health. Jane Salamone, MD, is Executive Medical Director of Rochester Regional Health’s Primary Care Institute. The Women’s Health & Wellness Center is at 3349 Monroe Avenue (Pittsford Plaza), Rochester, NY 14618, (585) 922-9206.