Interview with Saraswathi Vedam

Professor Saraswathi Vedam will Chair theUS Birth Summit IV: Addressing Our Shared Responsibility to Ensure Equity, Safety, and Respect Across All Communities. At Summit IV, there will be leaders from 11 stakeholder perspectives: consumers, community health, service providers, consumer advocates, innovative models of care, health systems, health policy and law, research, payment reform, health professional educators, health administration, and quality and safety. Using a proven model for transdisciplinary engagement, delegates will co-create an implementation strategy to ensure that emerging tools and models of care that are changing equity for childbearing families, become standard of care across the United States.  Overall, the aim of Birth Summit IV is risk reduction and improved access to high quality care across all communities.
 
Professor Vedam has been active in setting national and international policy on place of birth, and midwifery education and regulation. She has provided expert consultations to policy makers in Mexico, Hungary, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Canada, the US, and India. She was Convener and Chair of 3 national Home Birth Consensus Summits. At these historic summits a multi-stakeholder group of leaders (clinicians, consumers, policymakers, legislators, researchers, ethicists, and administrators) crafted a common agenda to address equitable access to high quality care across birth settings in the United States. In 2010, she chaired the 5th International Normal Labour and Birth Research conference in Vancouver.Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.

Saraswathi Vedam is Lead Investigator of the Birth Place Lab at University of British Columbia. Her scholarly work includes the Canadian Birth Place Study examining attitudes to home birth among maternity care providers; and Changing Childbirth in BC, a provincial, community-based participatory study of women’s experiences of maternity care.  She led the AIMM Mapping Study on how maternal and newborn outcomes are linked to the degree of integration of providers into into a health care system, and the Giving Voice to Mothers Study that explores equity and access to high quality care among marginalized communities.  She developed two new person-centred quality measures: the Mothers’ Autonomy in Decision Making (MADM) scale and the Mothers on Respect (MORi) index.  These received the National Quality Forum 2017 Innovation Prize.  In collaboration with multi-disciplinary expert panel, she also developed the Birth Place Research Quality (ResQu) Index, a novel critical appraisal tool. Professor Vedam  is currently leading a 5-year national CIHR- funded national research project to evaluate respectful maternity care, Giving Voice -Canada.

How to network with Professor Vedam:
Saraswathi Vedam, RM FACNM MSN Sci D(hc)
Principal, Birth Place Lab
MSFHR Health Professional Investigator
Professor, UBC Midwifery
Faculty of Medicine
University of British Columbia
304-5950 University Boulevard
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3
 
(604) 875-2424 x 5771  Lab
(604) 822-8030  Facsimile
saraswathi.vedam@ubc.ca 

People, places and things mentioned on the podcast:
US Birth Summit IV
Birth Summit IV Delegates
Birth Summit IV Live Streaming
Birth Summit Sponsorship
Birth Place Labs