Join us on Wednesday, May 20th, as the AVA Webinar Series presents We Have Met the Enemy and They Are Us: How Do Pregnant People Define Quality and Safety?, featuring Dr. Saraswathi Vedam from the Birthplace Lab at the University of British Columbia
Wednesday, May 20th, 2026
12 – 1:30pm MST
What does the evidence tell us about the effects of loss of bodily autonomy and discrimination during health care encounters on short and long term well-being? How do provider interactions affect experiences of reproductive and perinatal services? Should caesarean reduction be the goal? Do Black and Indigenous lives matter to nurse, midwife and medical providers? How can providers action their beliefs about human rights? What does a provider’s responsibility to engage in anti-oppression praxis look like?
This session will explore findings and insights from participatory research on quality, safety, risk, and present anti-racist actions, models, and accountability tools that clinicians and health systems can adopt to accept responsibility and enhance quality and safety.
About the Speaker
Dr. Saraswathi Vedam is Lead Investigator at the Birth Place Lab and Professor of Midwifery at the University of British Columbia. Over the past 40 years, she has been a clinician-scientist, educator, and mother of four daughters. Her work has helped shape international policy on place of birth, midwifery integration, and equitable access to high-quality perinatal care. Her research examines respect, discrimination, and mistreatment in perinatal services among historically marginalized communities. Dr. Vedam has led several participatory action research projects across North America, including the Canadian Birth Place Study and RESPCCT, a national CIHR-funded study on perinatal care experiences across Canada. Her team developed widely used person-centred quality measures, including the My Autonomy in Decision Making (MADM) scale, Mothers on Respect (MORi) index, and Mistreatment in Childbirth (MIST) index. These tools won the National Quality Forum Innovation Prize in 2017 and are now used in 64 countries. Dr. Vedam leads the Justice and Equity in Perinatal Services Hub and received the 2025 Lifetime Visionary Award from the American College of Nurse-Midwives.