Grantee in the Spotlight

Transparency in Maternity Care Project

The Coalition for Improving Maternity Services formed the Transparency in Maternity Care Project to ensure public access to information specifically related to the quality of care given by maternity care providers and institutions. It aims to extend the current social trend toward transparency in health care into the virtually overlooked maternity care arena.

The Transparency in Maternity Care Project will provide information that will help women make fully informed maternity care decisions. They also believe that maternity care practitioners and institutions must have access to feedback from their patients, hoping that doctors, midwives, and hospital administrators will find the information generated through the Transparency in Maternity Care Project useful in quality improvement efforts.

At the heart of the project is an on–going, online consumer survey, [ The Birth Survey ], that asks women to provide feedback about their birth experience with a particular doctor or midwife and within a specific birth environment. Responses will be made available online to other women in their community who are deciding where and with whom to birth. Paired with this experiential data will be official statistics from state departments of health listing obstetrical intervention rates at the facility level.