Saraswathi Vedam

Saraswathi Vedam

Contact

Midwifery Program
320-5950 University Boulevard, Department of Family Practice, UBC
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3 Canada
saraswathi.vedam@ubc.ca

Websites and Social Media

The Birth Place Lab, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

Publications

Saraswathi Vedam is Lead Investigator of the Birth Place Lab and Professor of Midwifery, at University of British Columbia. She has been a clinician and a health professional educator for over 30 years. Professor Vedam has successfully coordinated multi-stakeholder community-led research projects in provincial and national settings. Her research projects include the national, CIHR-funded Canadian Birth Place Study examining attitudes to place of birth among maternity care providers; and Changing Childbirth in BC, a provincial, participatory study of women’s preferences for maternity care. The Giving Voice to Mothers Study explored experiences of respect, discrimination, and inequities in access to quality care among communities of color and among those who plan home and birth center births. Professor Vedam is currently PI of a CIHR-funded national research project to evaluate respectful maternity care, Giving Voice to Mothers-Canada. In 2017, she was selected as one of the inaugural, Michael Smith Health Research Institute Health Professional Investigators.

She has applied her expertise with instrument development and psychometric evaluation to the development of clinical screening tools, MAPi, the Movement and Pulse index to assess fetal well-being, and scales to measure provider attitudes to home birth (PAPHB, PAPHI-i). Recently, she lead a multi-disciplinary team in the Access and Integration Maternity care Mapping (AIMM) Study to develop the MISS index, an evidence-based composite measure of the integration of midwives into health systems. She also led a Delphi team of multi-disciplinary experts to develop and validate the Birthplace ResQu Index, first critical appraisal tool for research on safety of birth place.