HMC Ethics Forum | Part 2 - Applying a Black Feminist Epistemology to Perinatal Quality Evaluation

Applying a Black Feminist Epistemology to Perinatal Quality Evaluation

This session introduces participants to Black woman-defined theoretical frameworks that contextualize the manufactured Black maternal health crisis (at the structural level) and quality of clinical practices and behaviors (at the departmental, team, and interpersonal levels). By engaging with these frameworks, participants will gain a more accurate and precise understanding of the systemic failures contributing to violations of quality and patient safety.

Objectives:

1. Name at least two Black woman defined theoretical frameworks to contextualize the manufactured Black maternal health crisis.

2. Analyze a Black birth narrative through application of the “PHI Approach” + Black Feminist perspectives.

3. Identify at least one solution across 3 levels (structural, disciplinary, institutional) to shift power and shape safety during hospital births.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG (she/her), proudly stands as the Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO, and Owner of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC, with nearly 30 years of supporting women, girls, and gender expansive people across the sexual, reproductive and perinatal life course. Her work interrogates and transforms quality and patient safety paradigms through application of participatory multilevel quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods and methodologies that simultaneously operationalize Black feminism, reproductive justice, and research justice, at the intersection of cultural humility and scientific rigor, also known as cultural rigor. As an improvement and implementation scientist activist, boarded certified "dissident and recovering" OBGYN, and applied epidemiologist grounded, she and her team developed the first and only validated Patient Reported Experience Measure of obstetric racism© (the PREM-OB Scale™ Suite), which is now available for implementation, spread, and scale as prevention and mitigation against obstetric racism. Dr. Scott is also the author of SACKRED Birth: Mobilizing A New Quality Paradigm in Obstetric Care, a vital call for prioritizing Black mothers’ expectations, expressions, and experiences in clinical practice, decision making, and care delivery using new quality norms and methodologies to amplify the humanity and power, not pathology, of Black reproducing bodies and Black births.