Working together to reduce disparities and improve outcomes for all birthing people and newborns across Illinois

Illinois Perinatal Quality Collaborative’s (ILPQC) is developing a proposal entitled “Working together to reduce disparities and improve outcomes for all birthing people and newborns across Illinois” in response to the CDC funding opportunity for Statewide Perinatal Quality Collaboratives (CDC-RFA-DP22-2207). ILPQC has demonstrated its leadership and has made significant strides to engage a diverse set of perinatal and community stakeholders in a collaborative effort to improve obstetric and neonatal care to reduce disparities and improve outcomes for birthing persons and newborns across Illinois. ILPQC helps clinical teams achieve improvements in care and outcomes by creating opportunities for collaborative learning, use of rapid response data to drive quality improvement, and ongoing quality improvement education and support. ILPQC is working with patients, physicians, midwives, nurses, hospitals, stakeholders, and community groups to implement a Birth Equity Initiative focused on actionable strategies to address disparities in birth outcomes for Black women and women of color in Illinois. The goal of the initiative is to help Illinois birthing hospitals work together to reduce maternal disparities and promote birth equity by ensuring all women receive respectful care. The initiative will focus on six key strategies: (1) implement universal social determinants of health screening prenatally and during delivery admission; (2) review hospital-level maternal health quality data by race, ethnicity, and Medicaid status to identify disparities and opportunities for improvement; (3) engage patients and community members to provide input on quality improvement efforts; (4) implement a strategy for sharing expected respectful care practices during delivery admission; and survey patients before discharge on their care experience to obtain feedback; (5) standardize postpartum patient safety education prior to hospital discharge, improve patient-provider communication and early follow-up, and (6) implement patient-centered staff and provider training to promote respectful care and active listening to patients and address implicit bias.