Helping Black Families to Grow and Thrive

But within moments, about a dozen Penn Medicine doctors and nurses flooded her hospital room, bringing a cart loaded with supplies to treat the hemorrhage. A doctor massaged Williams’ uterus while reaching inside her to remove remaining blood clots. Another team member used an ultrasound to check for placenta fragments. A third started an intravenous line for fluids. A nurse told Williams: “We’re not going to let you die.”

Williams, who survived the hemorrhage, fully recovered and is back home as a mother of two in West Philadelphia, later learned that her life-saving care on the night of Zahiri’s birth wasn’t an anomaly. The standardized postpartum hemorrhage treatment she received, which included the availability of hemorrhage carts, enhanced safety protocols and training for labor floor nurses to rapidly transfuse blood, was part of a comprehensive, system-wide, multi-year initiative by Penn Medicine to improve maternal health outcomes and reduce racial and ethnic disparities.

A Unified System-Wide Effort to Reduce Maternal Health Disparities

The approach to maternal health equity at Penn Medicine encompasses a unified effort from across the University of Pennsylvania Health System, endorsed and supported as a system goal by its executive leaders, with participation from any and all departments that could potentially make an impact.

This comprehensive undertaking involves not only a broad array of quality improvements and innovations in patient care, but also faculty research and community engagement. Some of the core principles underlying the efforts include standardizing patient care during key moments in pregnancy and childbirth to reduce opportunities for racial bias, and centering equity as a goal by targeting specific maternal health programs to historically underserved populations. More than just focusing on pregnancy and childbirth, the initiative aims to connect with pregnant people during this unique time of intensive medical care as a bridge across the continuum—aiming to keep them and their entire families connected to a lifetime of quality health care. And making a broader influence with these innovations is a primary goal, so not only Penn patients benefit, but also new parents and families across the city of Philadelphia, the region, and the U.S. as a whole.

“We’re doing everything we can to intervene so we can have a healthy mom and a healthy baby, and then have that translated to a healthy family and healthy community,” said Elizabeth Howell, MD, MPP, chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Harrison McCrea Dickson, MD President’s Distinguished Professor, who is spearheading the initiative along with Sindhu Srinivas, MD, MSCE, a professor and vice chair for quality and safety in the department.

The new system-wide standard procedure for postpartum hemorrhage care is just one aspect of the maternal health equity initiative. Starting in 2020, Howell and Srinivas led an outreach process that went wide and deep to connect with faculty and front-line staff at all five birthing hospitals in Penn Medicine’s system, building consensus and connections. The system-wide team goal gave a framework for each person involved in the care of a birthing parent or infant to see their role in patients’ experiences—and to contribute to both discrete and collaborative efforts to reduce the harmful inequities for Black birthing parents.

The results speak for themselves. Maternal morbidity—that is, health problems resulting from pregnancy and childbirth—dropped nearly 30 percent at Penn Medicine hospitals after the first year of implementing the system-wide effort to address disparities.

Influencing Improvements in Maternal Health Across Philadelphia and the United States

Today, Philadelphia’s postpartum hemorrhage death rate is lower than the national average. That is partly due to Penn Medicine’s influence in the city—Penn hospitals account for roughly half of all baby deliveries in Philadelphia. But it also stems from the hospital system’s commitment to sharing its successes with maternity care providers throughout the city and beyond, helping to improve care for even more new and expectant mothers.

Addressing Maternal Health Equity at Every Stage

Addressing the health needs of birthing parents and their families is something that Penn Medicine is addressing to eliminate inequities at every stage in the continuum of care:

• Pregnancy and delivery are crucial time periods where some of the most important efforts are aimed at not just standardizing the highest quality of care, but also reversing racism in the health care system and targeting outreach to Black communities in order to rebuild trust.
• The first few weeks postpartum, when parents go home with their newborns, form an important transition period. During this time, innovative technology-based programs created at Penn Medicine help connect parents to care that can not only ease their transition, but prevent medical complications in this sensitive period.
• After and in between pregnancies, other initiatives seek to build upon the uniquely intense connection that pregnant people have with the health care system—to help build a bridge toward sustaining lifelong health for themselves, and for their entire families.

Healthy Families, Thriving Communities

Back home in her West Philadelphia community, today Talicia Williams is a healthy mother of two who delights in seeing her young children play alongside a gaggle of nieces and nephews. Her son, Tayale, is nearly 5 and attends a half-day preschool program. Daughter Zahiri, now 2, loves to chase her older brother when he’s home—and to playact some ideas she has picked up about mothering from Williams, the mother she so easily could have lost in those frightening moments after her birth. “My niece was crying and Zahiri ran out and shushed her,” Williams said, laughing at her toddler pretending to be her cousin’s mom. “I’m like, ‘Girl, you’re the same age!’”

This story, together with related coverage of maternal health equity during pregnancy, postpartum, and across the family’s lifespan, are also published in print as the cover story of the Fall/Winter 2023 issue of Penn Medicine magazine.