As a first step to understanding the best ways to advance equity in quality improvement, CMQCC launched a birth equity pilot collaborative in 2019 with hospital leaders. The participating hospitals are geographically diverse, serve a large proportion of Black birthing people, and are highly motivated to improve birth outcomes, the birthing experience and care for Black mothers and birthing people.
Over the course of the pilot initiative, the Collaborative is working together with participating hospitals to achieve the following goals:
- Deploying a patient-reported experience metric (PREM)
- Promoting online interactive and interprofessional educational resources
- Piloting best practices for addressing hospital culture to support birth equity
The Birth Equity Collaborative adopted the World Health Organization definition of respectful maternity care as a guiding principal, which refers to care organized for and provided to all women and birthing people in a manner that maintains their dignity, privacy and confidentiality, ensures freedom from harm and mistreatment, and enables informed choice and continuous support during labor and childbirth, regardless of their race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, sexuality, age, disability, HIV status, immigration status, housing status, income, or insurance status and type.