Healthy Start

The Tulsa Health Department’s Healthy Start program is confidential and free and works to ensure our families are healthy, safe and thriving.

About Us

Tulsa County moms, babies and dads deserve the best. Healthy Start provides free and confidential clinic triage and home visitation case management services for expecting and postpartum moms and their babies up to age eighteen months. The goal of the program is to improve birth outcomes and reduce infant mortality with an emphasis on those populations at highest risk. Healthy Start helps families with:

• Prenatal and postpartum care
• Fatherhood program
• Access to health services for baby and childhood immunizations
• WIC and health insurance referrals
• Parenting skills
• Food, clothing, baby needs and housing assistance
• Links to local resources for jobs, child care, counseling and education

The program is community based, using case management as the core service and a community consortia advisory structure to achieve improved birth outcomes and a strengthened community infrastructure. Healthy Start seeks to preserve continuity of care for women, children and families throughout their child-bearing years.

Healthy Start services are offered through numerous area clinics and at THD’s North Regional Health and Wellness Center, 5635 N. Martin Luther King, Jr., Blvd. For more information, please contact Healthy Start Program Manager Christy Edmonds at 918-595-4220 or cedmonds@tulsa-health.org.

Healthy Start Referral Form:

• Please print and fax this completed Healthy Start Referral Form to 918-595-4282.
• To submit electronically, please fill out this Referral Form.

This program is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Fatherhood Program

In addition, the Healthy Start program is committed to improving the father, parent-child relationship through fatherhood engagement. THD’s Fatherhood Program promotes this philosophy by linking fathers to resources that strengthen the role for the involvement of the father; education on the stages of pregnancy; postpartum education; and education on Safe Sleep for Babies and Period of PURPLE Crying (PURPLE)®. THD’s Fatherhood Program also offers group sessions (Dad 2 Dad) once a month using the 24/7 Dad® curriculum, a voluntary and comprehensive fatherhood program designed to help men improve their parenting skills and fathering knowledge.

THD’s Fatherhood Program works with fathers to help them with the following:

• Parenting skills and Co-parenting skills
• Life skills / goal setting
• Employment referrals
• Communication skills
• Anger management
• Male reproductive health services
• Housing assistance
• Food and clothing assistance
• Transportation services (taxi, bus passes)
• Child support referrals to Department of Human Services

For additional program information contact Byron Dixon, THD Healthy Start Fatherhood Coordinator, at 918-595-4223 or bdixon@tulsa-health.org.