Professor Saraswathi Vedam will Chair the US 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.