Seed Grant Award: Targeting Provider Bias to Advance Health Equity in Maternal Care

The proposal is based in the premise that implicit bias training and provider education about maternal health disparities is a formative part of a framework for addressing unconscious biases which impact the delivery of care to women from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds.  The steps described are modified from the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health patient safety bundle for the reduction of peripartum racial disparities. This project aims to address provider unconscious bias through targeted and sustained training as a means of improving patient-provider interactions to enhance the quality of health communication and decision-making and ultimately improve maternal health outcomes. The project is a three-fold collaborative education strategy for establishing health equity in obstetrics and gynecology at CUIMC. the objectives are to: 1)reduce bias through facilitated training and the implementation of a standard education module on peripartum disparities; 2) enhance provider reach by partnering with maternal care providers from another discipline; and 3) measure progress by creating a dashboard to track health outcomes by race and ethnicity.

For more information: https://safehealthcareforeverywoman.org/council/patient-safety-bundles/maternal-safety-bundles/reduction-of-peripartum-racial-ethnic-disparities-aim/

Spring 2021 Update: 

The grant awardees held their first facilitated conversation on racial equity and implicit bias on February 25, 2021. The session was attended by 50 members of the Department of OBGYN and Division of Obstetric Anesthesiology. By combining these two groups we were able to extend the impact of the workshops. The second workshop in the series was scheduled for April 22, 2021. 

This project was funded through the Addressing Racism: A Call to Action for Higher Education initiative of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.