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Call for papers - Quality improvement in maternal and reproductive health services

Guest Editors:
Erika M. Edwards: University of Vermont, USA
Celia Karp: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA
Hannah Tappis: Jhpiego - an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, USA

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline:  31 August 2023


BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women's Health are calling for submissions to our Collection on Quality improvement in maternal and reproductive health services.

Quality health services, including midwifery, obstetric and gynecological care, is key to ensuring the fulfillment of human rights in reproductive health.  High-quality care is needed to meet Sustainable Development Goal 3, achieving good health and wellbeing for all women.  Quality improvement in health care integrates evidence-based approaches to advance the effectiveness, safety, and value of healthcare and to improve reproductive health outcomes.  Quality improvement approaches in midwifery, obstetrics and gynecology are needed to ensure that all women receive high-quality, safe, and person-centered care.

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BMC Women's Health

Meet the Guest Editors

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Erika M. Edwards: University of Vermont, USA

Erika Edwards is a Research Associate Professor in Statistics and Pediatrics at the University of Vermont, and is Director of Data Science at Vermont Oxford Network, a voluntary worldwide collaboration of health care professionals dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and value of care for newborns and their families. She holds a PhD and MPH in epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health.
 

Celia Karp: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA

Dr. Celia Karp social and behavioral scientist in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  She is dedicated to research, teaching, and mentorship in the field of women’s sexual and reproductive health across the lifecourse.  Her work encompasses two overarching areas: psychosocial determinants of reproductive health, including, pregnancy preferences and decision-making related to childbearing, contraception, and abortion, and systems shaping women's health and well-being, including access to and quality of reproductive services.  Dr. Karp’s research focuses on the intersection of women’s reproductive health preferences, services, and outcomes in low-resource settings.  Through her work, Dr. Karp aims to enhance understanding, measurement, and mitigation of factors contributing to adverse sexual and reproductive health outcomes and inequities.

Hannah Tappis: Jhpiego - an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, USA

Hannah Tappis, DrPH, MPH is a Senior Technical Advisor at Jhpiego - an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, and associate faculty at the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, where her work focuses on generating and using evidence to improve the quality of reproductive, maternal and newborn health care for underserved populations. Her research includes health systems and policy research, implementation science and program evaluation in more than 20 countries, primarily in humanitarian and post-conflict settings. Dr. Tappis has been a Senior Editorial Board Member for BMC Health Services Research and an Editorial Board Member for BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth since 2020.

About the collection

Quality health services, including midwifery, obstetric and gynecological care, is key to ensuring the fulfillment of human rights in reproductive health.  High-quality care is needed to meet Sustainable Development Goal 3, achieving good health and wellbeing for all women.  Quality improvement in health care integrates evidence-based approaches to advance the effectiveness, safety, and value of healthcare and to improve reproductive health outcomes.  Quality improvement approaches in midwifery, obstetrics and gynecology are needed to ensure that all women receive high-quality, safe, and person-centered care.

BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women's Health are launching a new Collection, ‘Quality improvement in maternal and reproductive health services,’ to highlight research that investigates ways in which the delivery of high-quality women’s health services can be strengthened to align with clinical standards, evidence-based practices, and individuals’ preferences for care.  Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, design and evaluation of quality improvement interventions, development of new metrics for measuring quality, and examination of inequities in the delivery of high-quality care - all with a focus on maternal and reproductive health services.  The Collection welcomes quantitative and qualitative research from around the globe and across the full spectrum of the reproductive health field.

Image credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment

  2. Reducing pregnancy-related deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa through increases in health facility births may be achieved by promoting community norms and network norms favoring health facility births. However, the ...

    Authors: Leslie E. Cofie, Clare Barrington, Kersten Cope, Catherine E. LePrevost and Kavita Singh
    Citation: BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2023 23:265
    Content type: Research Published on:

  3. Limited evidence is available as the reference for the model of care on providing maternity care in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) to cope with pandemic disruption. This study aimed to adopt internati...

    Authors: Fitriana Murriya Ekawati, Mumtihana Muchlis and Amita Tuteja
    Citation: BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2023 23:132
    Content type: Research Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of Research Articles, Data Notes, Case Reports, Study Protocols, and Database Articles. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read the submission guidelines of the journal you are submitting to: BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women's Health. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp: BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women's Health. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Quality improvement in maternal and reproductive health services" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the standard peer-review process of the journal they are considered in (BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women's Health), and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.