Maria Stock has made a career of helping families experience healthy pregnancies, deliver healthy babies, and ensure all have opportunities to thrive. Maria is the Maternal Child Health Coordinator for the Fairfax County Health Department dedicated to ensuring maternal and child health services are accessible to all within our community.
With a focus on researching and implementing best practices, Maria strives to find effective ways to reach families who lack access to care. It’s a passion that drives the direction of the program. “It goes back to a tug I felt in nursing school,” said Maria. “I want to see populations who are under-resourced cared for just like families who have health insurance. I always feel like I need to be their champion.”
One area Maria and her team are passionate about is championing the impact of immunizations. Keeping up to date with required and recommended vaccinations remains a critical component of staying healthy from vaccine-preventable diseases. Yet, over the years, there has been a decline in the number of babies, school-aged children and young adults who are current on their vaccinations. With August being National Immunization Awareness Month, the Maternal Child Health team are making a concerted effort to remind families, community partners and health-care providers the importance of staying on schedule with vaccines.
“We recognize that beliefs and attitudes toward immunizations have shifted since the pandemic,” said Maria. “In prior years, most people relied on nurses’ or doctors’ recommendations. Now we see pushback, we see social media misinformation, and because of the success of vaccines, many people have no recollection of how terrible some of these vaccine-preventable diseases can be.”
Maria specifically cites the resurgence of pertussis as an example. “Right now, we’re looking into the DTaP and Tdap rates among children and adolescents, and for the segment of the population we have data on, those rates are not as high as we’d like to see,” said Maria.
Another project Maria is supporting is a program to prepare healthcare providers to offer stronger recommendations for the HPV vaccine.
“We’re not seeing a large enough percentage of parents opting in for this vaccine in Fairfax County,” said Maria. “We want to help enhance the understanding that this vaccine is an important way to prevent certain cancers later in life, and that the best results occur when this vaccine is given in the early teen years. So, we’re developing an information module to help educate clinic and school nurses, and other providers on how to have those conversations with parents.”
And if past performance is an indicator of future success, Maria points to the massive response to Covid-19 as illustration of the ability to help protect public health through vaccinations.
“Covid was a game changer for the immunization program,” said Maria. “It took so much work, so much planning, so much cooperation and collaboration, and so much education, even before we could open vaccine sites. It was an immense and overwhelming experience. But I’m proud to say that we did our best, and I think we met the challenge.”
For more information about the Maternal Childhood Health program, visit the Maternal and Child Health page on the Fairfax County Health Department website.
To learn more about keeping your family safe from preventable illnesses, visit the Immunization and Vaccinations page on the Fairfax County Health Department website.