Saraswathi Vedam

Saraswathi Vedam is lead investigator of the Birth Place Lab and professor of midwifery in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. She has been a clinician, researcher and health professional educator for over 30 years and has coordinated several transdisciplinary and community-led research projects. In the United States, she led the Access and Integration Maternity care Mapping (AIMM) Study on the impact of integration of midwives on maternal-newborn outcomes, and the Giving Voice to Mothers Study that explored experiences of respect, discrimination, and inequities in access to quality care among communities of colour in the U.S.

Vedam’s research projects include the Canadian Birth Place Study examining attitudes to place of birth among maternity care providers, and Changing Childbirth in BC, a provincial, participatory study of women’s experiences of maternity care. Professor Vedam is currently the principal investigator of a national CIHR-funded national research project to evaluate respectful maternity care across Canada. Her scholarly work includes the development of pragmatic tools that improve person-centred care, including patient-designed quality measures; Mothers’ Autonomy in Decision Making (MADM) scale, and the Mothers on Respect (MORi) index, which received the 2017 National Quality Forum Innovation Prize. In 2017, she was selected as one of the inaugural Michael Smith Health Research Institute Health Professional Investigators.

An up-to-date list of publications by Saraswathi Vedam is available here.