The Hub will bring together several key and often underrepresented groups across Canada, including racialized, gender-diverse and Indigenous health service users, clinicians, policy makers, researchers, and persons with lived experience of pregnancy to meaningfully engage and co-create knowledge mobilization activities to reduce severe maternal morbidity and mortality.
Lead investigators involved
Isabelle Malhamé is a Clinician Scientist in Obstetric Medicine and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal.
Her research program, supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Canadian Foundation for Women’s Health, focuses on reducing severe maternal morbidity, with a special interest in cardiovascular and thromboembolic complications.
In 2022, she received an Early Career Investigator Award from the Gairdner Foundation and the Canada Gairdner Awards in recognition of her work to improve maternal health.
Rohan D’Souza is a Clinician Scientist in Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence & Impact at McMaster University. His research program supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Juravinski Research Institute, Public Health Agency of Canada, and the Hamilton Academic Health Sciences Association focuses on reducing pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality, improving outcome reporting in obstetric studies and incorporating patient values and preferences into obstetric decision-making and research. He holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Maternal Health.
The Canadian Perinatal Programs Coalition is a is an organization of perinatal programs and associations fostering and supporting optimal care of childbearing families by 1) serving as a vehicle for health service providers to share information on quality improvement projects, 2) promoting the uptake of evidence-informed practices, and 3) disseminating existing resources to enhance program development for reproductive health services.
What is the ‘origin story’ of your professional interest in this topic?
Isabelle: It is during my work as a physician specialized in Obstetric (Internal) Medicine in health care centres across Canada and the United States that I witnessed pregnancy-related near miss events. Caring for individuals before, during, and after pregnancy, who had experienced such an event strengthened my desire to become a researcher in this field. Importantly, this lived experience forged my conviction that we can and must do better for birthing people and served as a compass to build a research program centering on this topic.
What impact do you hope to have as a researcher/clinician working on this topic?
As researchers and clinicians working in this area of women and gender diverse people’s health, we hope to be part of a community working together to mobilize knowledge supporting birthing individuals across their pregnancy journey. To this end, our team’s aim is to co-develop accurate and relevant knowledge mobilization tools to preserve and enhance the safety of birthing individuals, with the voices of people with lived experience of pregnancy at the heart of what is built.
What do you wish people knew about the topic you are working on?
For every person dying during or after pregnancy, about 100 more experience “near-miss events” or serious pregnancy-related complications. We know that these conditions, which can have a lasting impact on birthing individuals and their families’ health and wellbeing, can be prevented in the majority of cases. As a result, there is an urgent and unmet clinical need to reduce the knowledge-to-action gap in this area of women and gender-diverse people’s health through the development of knowledge mobilization activities addressing pregnancy-related near-miss events and deaths.
Community partners and their role in the Hub
Our Hub community brings together 70+ of stakeholders from several key and often underrepresented groups across Canada, including racialized, gender-diverse, and Indigenous health service users, clinicians, policy makers, researchers, and persons with lived experience of pregnancy to meaningfully engage and co-create knowledge mobilization activities to reduce severe maternal morbidity and mortality.
Since the process of engaging is as important as the outputs created, we have co-developed our Hub’s governance structure as well as expectations of how we will be working together in the different spaces of the Hub, including foundational documents such as our co-created Guidelines for Working Together building on the Valuing All Voices Framework (1).
Engagement activities within our Hub’s community include an Advisory Sharing Circle held every 3 months, Townhall Meetings hosted every 6 months, and a newsletter sent out every 3 months.
What activities are you undertaking?
Our focus is on co-creating Knowledge Mobilization activities addressing pregnancy-related near-miss events and deaths. The following activities are planned or currently underway:
Outreach town halls to engage in bilateral exchange in a live format with our Hub community and the Public to pursue accountability of the work being carried out.
Process maps to support clinical teams wishing to improve care in birthing spaces by integrating new evidence-based practices in a human-centred way.
Educational resources to support clinical teams wishing to carry out culturally appropriate, gender-sensitive, near-miss event reviews that will help to prevent these events going forward.
Research priority setting activities to identify community-centred research priorities that will guide the co-creation of future work to address pregnancy-related near miss events and deaths.
An evidence and gap map that will serve as repository of solutions to prevent pregnancy-related near-miss events and deaths, according to identified research priorities.
What would look different if your Hub has the impact you envision? What changes and how?
We are hoping to inspire a movement towards more supportive, person- and community-centred care. Our methods involve the co-creation of knowledge mobilization activities to reduce pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality in partnership with communities that carry the greatest burden of harm to stop perpetuating systems of oppression and marginalization in health care. This is particularly relevant to birthing spaces with a dominant biomedical model of care, where instances of near-miss events may take place, and where other models of care would also be needed.
By using human-centred design and participatory approaches, we seek to co-build material that will be relevant to several birthing spaces, adopted by as many clinical teams as possible, and connected to the priorities of birthing people and their communities.
Pages people can visit to learn more
We have a webpage connected to the LOUVE-Research website: https://louve-research.ca/the-hub
Contact information
Please contact the Hub’s Project Manager: [email protected]
Social media handles
X/Twitter: @IsabelleMalhame; @SingingOB; @LOUVEresearch
