The Role of WIC and How It Helps Manage Health Disparities

Healthcare isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

Care is better when it’s accessible, personal, and comprehensive.

That’s why healthcare providers at Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC) focus on services that bridge health disparity gaps. We offer a range of amenities, programs, and providers that are matched to your precise healthcare requirements.

Some of the most valuable, accessible programming at LCHC includes our Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) services. These are designed to help pregnant and postpartum women with things like nutrition planning, smart app progress tracking, and a number of beneficial support and resource solutions.

The healthcare professionals at LCHC believe everyone deserves quality care. This has been our mantra for over fifty years. How we manage health disparities through our WIC offerings is just one of the ways LCHC provides high-quality healthcare to our local communities.

What is WIC?

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) explains the premise of their national WIC program:

“The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children—better known as the WIC program—serves to safeguard the health of low-income pregnant, postpartum, and breastfeeding women, infants, and children up to age five who are at nutritional risk. We provide nutritious foods to supplement diets, information on healthy eating that includes breastfeeding promotion and support, and referrals to health care.”

WIC is a federal grant program, and LCHC is one of many grant recipients around the country. Our WIC funding is administered through a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

We’re committed to the WIC mission as the largest healthcare provider in the Lynn area. As a result, we provide an ever-expanding number of WIC services for low-income and nutritionally at-risk individuals and their families.

We Minimize Health Disparities with WIC Resources at LCHC

Lynn Community Health Center is not your typical healthcare provider. Our exceptional  behavioral health, addiction treatment, and primary care services are only the “tip of a very large iceberg.”

Our WIC specialists know what pregnant mothers, postpartum parents, and new families need to find their bearings and move forward with a plan.

Specialized services provided through our WIC programs include:

• Free healthful food
• Personalized nutrition consultations
• Tips for eating well to improve health
• Referrals for medical and dental care, health insurance, childcare, housing and fuel assistance, and more
• Immunization screening and referral
• Award-winning Breastfeeding support programs

LCHC also offers several WIC-focused nutrition and health workshops that include:

• Meal planning
• How to maintain a healthy weight
• Breastfeeding
• Caring for a new baby
• Shopping on a budget
• And more

The professionals at LCHC always provide far more than the bare minimum. As an example, we’re able to provide care and service in a number of different languages, and 80% of our patients are best served in a language other than English. We continue to invest our time, resources, and people in ways that enhance our WIC services even further.

Specialized Women, Infants, and Children Services

LCHC upholds standards established by the National Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, and we do much more than that. We’ve provided exceptional healthcare services for decades, which has given us the expertise to develop our programs beyond what is expected of most traditional health centers.

Our specialized WIC program services include:

A WIC Nutrition Program: The WIC Nutrition Program provides free, nutritious foods, health screenings, health information, and referrals to other agencies.

Our WIC Shopper App: The WIC Shopper Mobile App lets you view your current benefits, check in “real-time” whether the foods you are shopping for are eligible, access healthful recipes, and find a store that accepts the WIC Card. Users also benefit from our WIC Card to Culture program, which provides access to a number of museums and other culturally significant Boston locations.

WIC Smart Online Nutrition Education: LCHC’s WIC Smart Online Nutrition Education is a resource for caregivers of infants and children nine months and up. It lets participants complete required nutritional education classes assigned to them by their online nutritionist at their convenience.

The Baby Café: Our Baby Café is a free drop-in center that offers breastfeeding support and assistance from professionals and other moms—all in a relaxed atmosphere. The Baby Café model has been so successful that there are now more than 100 Baby Café Centers around the world!

Breastfeeding Support: Our Breastfeeding Peer Counseling support services are an extension of the USDA’s national breastfeeding campaign—WIC Breastfeeding Support Learn Together, Grow Together. Breastfeeding Peer Counselors. These counselors are mothers in the community with personal breastfeeding experience. They understand the joys and challenges of breastfeeding and how to overcome barriers, which gives them the expertise to provide information and support to other mothers.

LCHC’s WIC Services Help Manage Health Disparities for Families

Lynn Community Health Center provides WIC programming as a primary tool to address socio-economic disparities in the communities we serve, and our dedication to excellence earned LCHC the 2022 USDA Gold Breastfeeding Award for Excellence.

As of March 2023, more than 8,000 women, children, and infants are directly served by the LCHC WIC program. This includes pregnant, breastfeeding postpartum, and non-breastfeeding postpartum patients. We strive to provide access to high-quality care that might otherwise not be available, and we can do so thanks, in part, to a national push focused on efforts to improve the quality of life for mothers, infants, children, families, and more.

Our dedicated staff includes nutrition counselors, breastfeeding peer counselors, program coordinators, program specialists, and more. We offer interpreter services in more than 250 languages (our qualified staff members speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Khmer, Laotian, and French), so our program innovations, benefits, and specialized services are accessible to all.

Not sure WIC services can help you? Trust us; they can. Contact our healthcare professionals today to talk about which solutions best serve your specific needs now and in the future.