Improving quality of care for mothers and newborns with the WHO Safe Childbirth Checklist: implementation experience from BetterBirth
UPDATE: Slides and Presentation by Katherine Semrau from this event available via Panopto .
Katherine Semrau, PhD, MPH, leads the BetterBirth Program and associated trial investigating the impact of the WHO Safe Childbirth Checklist and associated peer-coaching program on maternal and newborn health outcomes in Uttar Pradesh, India. She is director of the BetterBirth Program at Ariadne Labs and has over 15 years of experience with her research focusing on prevention of maternal and child mortality, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
As the co-Principal Investigator of the recently completed Zambia Chlorhexidine Application Trial (ZamCAT), Dr. Semrau led the epidemiology and data analysis team for this cluster randomized control trial of >39,000 births in Southern Province, Zambia. As a team member of the Zambia Exclusive Breastfeeding Study, she lived in Zambia for over 3 years running the study laboratory and coordinating all enrolment, data collection and data management activities. She then returned to the U.S. and collaborated on multiple projects in sub-Saharan Africa, India and the Republic of Georgia.
In addition, Katherine is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Division of Global Health Equity. Dr. Semrau’s dissertation research focused on breast problems, including mastitis and abscess, and HIV in HIV-infected women in Zambia. She has a PhD in epidemiology from Boston University and an MPH in international health and epidemiology from the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
