Direction-Setting Vision and Blueprint Reports

Challenges and Opportunities

• procedure-intensive, costly care for a largely healthy population
• overuse of many practices, associated with harm and waste
• underuse of beneficial practices that would improve outcomes
• many indicators that have been moving in the wrong direction
• poor showing in comparison with many other nations.

• identify the optimal aims and attributes of the U.S. maternity care system
• specify the most effective ways to realize those aims and attributes
• move expeditiously to undertake those priority action steps

How the Transforming Maternity Care project was carried out

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To help set the project direction, Childbirth Connection conducted key informant interviews with several dozen national health care quality improvement leaders and innovators, and summarized lessons learned from key informant interviews (PDF).

To help plan, carry out and report results of the project, Childbirth Connection convened a multi-disciplinary Steering Committee of national leaders. The Steering Committee designated the Milbank Report Evidence-Based Maternity Care: What It Is and What It Can Achieve as a background document clarifying challenges and opportunities for improving maternity care, guided all remaining project steps, and issued the resulting "Blueprint for Action."

A multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary team collaborated to develop a “2020 Vision for a High-Quality, High-Value Maternity Care System.”

Five stakeholder workgroups were convened to identify challenges and priority actions for their sector to undertake to move expeditiously toward the 2020 Vision. The diagram above names the five stakeholder areas.

Stakeholder workgroup chairs presented their reports and recommendations at an invitational policy symposium commemorating Childbirth Connection’s 90th anniversary. Transforming Maternity Care: A High Value Proposition was held at Georgetown University, Washington DC, in April 2009. Invited discussants, moderators and the audience provided comments to strengthen the reports and recommendations. A commissioned paper on Medicaid maternity care was also presented and discussed, and Childbirth Connection awarded the first Maternity Quality Matters Award to the Seton Family of Hospitals for demonstrated improvements in maternity care quality. There were numerous symposium co-sponsors and supporters (PDF).

The Steering Committee synthesized the workgroup reports and additional feedback into a direction-setting document, “Blueprint for Action: Steps Toward a High-Quality, High-Value Maternity Care System.”

After incorporating additional feedback, final stakeholder workgroup reports and recommendations have been posted on this website. The Vision paper, Blueprint, summary of symposium proceedings, and companion documents have been published in a special themed issue of Women’s Health Issues, which is freely available to those with Internet access. A Transforming Maternity Care leadership list (PDF) identifies the more than 100 individuals who made substantive contributions to this direction-setting work.

The “2020 Vision” and “Blueprint for Action” were released at a Transforming Maternity Care project briefing (PDF) at the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Washington DC office on January 28, 2010, and Childbirth Connection and many partners are currently focused on Blueprint Implementation.

Childbirth Connection deeply appreciates the extraordinary support provided by the many individuals who participated on project leadership groups and by symposium sponsors. Childbirth Connection is especially indebted to the Transforming Birth Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation for generous multi-year support for the Maternity Quality Matters Initiative.