February 19-23, 2025 NASHVILLE, TN
Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC (BCR) is hosting the Second Obstetric Patient Safety Summit 2025.
This is the first community-led and designed collective experience to address the seven pain points or performance indicators of quality and patient safety in obstetrics and perinatal care: ethics, knowledge, leadership, science, measurement selection and monitoring strategies, data quality and accessibility, and community participation and partnerships. Individuals, industries, associations, and organizations that impact Black women, girls, and gender expansive individuals, and their given and chosen communities during (in)ferility, pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, labor, birth, postpartum, lactation, and perinatal mood and and anxiety disorders. Applicants from the following fields or disciplines will be prioritized: obstetric racism, obstetric violence, abolitionist movement, quality, patient safety, health care financing, medical billing, medical coding, medical reimbursement, pharmacological and medical device industries, public health, public health law, social sciences, medical humanities, human rights/civil rights/birth justice attorneys, health care advocacy, health care law, public policy, quality improvement, implementation science, dissemination science, data science, measurement science, philanthropy, and legislative action and advocacy, chronic disease, postpartum care, community health, and health care.
Obstetric Patient Safety Summit 2025, known as OPSS 2025, is the brainchild of Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG, who also serves as BCR’s Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO, and Owner.
Welcome!
As a summit, OPSS 2025
aims to:
Transform hospital-based improvement and implementation initiatives through analysis of factors that reproduce, prevent, and/or mitigate obstetric racism during online and in-person experiential learning activities before, during, and after the summit.
Discuss big ideas, tackle big-picture questions, and generate improvement and implementation solutions for U.S. maternal-perinatal industries on a micro-, meso-, or macro-scale;
Facilitate registered participants to think of ways to recognize, report, and reconcile obstetric racism ahead of time, strengthening participation in large and small group breakout sessions;
Build practical knowledge and skills of participants to walk away with cutting-edge, scalable solutions for addressing obstetric racism and advancing obstetric patient safety for Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people, and our given and chosen kin.
Why OPSS 2025
Advancing quality and racial equity within patient safety requires measurement and analytic frameworks that address racism, specifically obstetric racism, as an adverse event. Despite quality improvement initiatives, clinical safety bundles, and technological advances, current hospital safety and quality programs fail to protect Black mothers and birthing people from harm during and after childbirth.
Hospitals, health plans, and quality organizations define safety as the absence of preventable harms in health care delivery. Yet standardized perinatal safety and quality measures primarily focus on physical outcomes, effectively excluding patient experience and community wisdom.
The ongoing structural, institutional, and disciplinary erasure or erosion of patient experiences and community wisdom limit measures’ capacity to provide sound information about the safety of care provided to Black birthing people: incorporation of obstetric racism as a patient safety indicator is essential.
OPSS 2025 offers the first and only in-person inter-professional experiential learning summit that builds practical knowledge and skills using improvement and implementation methodologies grounded in Cultural Rigor to name, recognize, report, respond to, and reconcile with obstetric racism as an adverse event that harms Black mothers and birthing people, and our given and chosen kin, during childbirth hospitalization and postpartum.
What is the meaning of the OPSS logo?
The Sankofa Adinkra symbol originates from the Akan people of Ghana and means "to go back and get it."
OPSS facilitates system transformations grounded in truth-telling, transparency, and trust. Thus, the incorporation of the Sankofa symbol in the OPSS logo best embodies the ethos of OPSS.
We reflect on the past.
We reclaim our humanity in the present.
We restore the sanctity and sovereignty of Black births and Black lives in the future.
-Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG
Format, Activities, and Themes
OPSS 2025 offers 4 days of collective mobilizing to address obstetric racism as an adverse event on the campus of Marriott Nashville at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN from Wednesday, February 19, 2025 through Sunday, February 23, 2025.
The OPSS summit utilizes narrative knowledge, reflexive writing, interactive lectures, small and large group discussions, Q & A sessions, and anonymous online polling with real time data visualization, and literary readings from anthropology, sociology, nursing, humanities, legal studies, religion studies, and bioethics.
SPECIAL OPSS HOTEL DISCOUNT rates end
JANUARY 20, 2025
EARLY BIRD Registration ends
November 30, 2024
GENERAL Registration starts
December 1, 2024
Itinerary
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Pre-Summit Workshop
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
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OPSS Day 1
Thursday, February 20, 2025
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OPSS Day 2
Friday, February 21, 2025
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OPSS Day 3
Saturday, February 22, 2025
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OPSS Brunch Bookreading
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Join the community-led movement to address obstetric racism and advance obstetric patient safety!! Register today
About the
Venue
The Nashville Marriott at Vanderbilt University is located adjacent to Vanderbilt University, and is just minutes away from Downtown, the neighborhoods of Hillsboro Village, 12 South, and more, with easy access to all that Nashville has to offer. You’ll love the on-site Central Bar + Kitchen, serving up American classics with a Southwest flair.
Special OPSS DISCOUNT rates end
JANUARY 20, 2025
Interested in being a sponsor for OPSS 2025?
Fund a community-led movement to address obstetric racism and advance obstetric patient safety by transforming hospital-based improvement and implementation initiatives. Click here to submit your sponsorship form today
Visit our sponsorship page to learn more about different sponsorship categories and benefits.
MEET OUR FOUNDER
Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG is the Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO, and Owner of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC.
Dr. Karen A. Scott has nearly 30 years of supporting women, girls, and gender expansive people across the sexual, reproductive and perinatal life course. Based in Tennessee, Dr. Scott is a national and international speaker about the ways in which obstetric racism violates the humanity, bodies, and lives of Black women, girls, and gender expansive people throughout health services design, provision, evaluation, and training, in the afterlife of slavery.
As an improvement and implementation scientist activist, community OBGYN, and applied epidemiologist grounded in a Black feminist-reproductive justice praxis, she developed the first and only validated Patient Reported Experience Measure of obstetric racismÓ (the PREM-OB Scale™ Suite), which is now available for implementation, spread, and scale as prevention and mitigation against obstetric racism.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION
The mission of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC is to improve the quality, safety, and value of health care experiences (“improvement science”) and facilitate community and health system uptake of evidence, empathy, and equity based interventions into practice and policy across the sexual, reproductive, and perinatal life course of Black women, girls, and gender expansive people (“implementation science”).
Our vision is to build a more humane and just health system that integrates patient experiences and community wisdom of Black women, girls, and gender expansive people into health services design, provision, evaluation, and training. We build community and organizational capacity in birthing cultural rigor in everyday care interactions, communication, counseling, decision-making, documentation, and dissemination.
Have a question? Need more info?
A member of BCR’s OPSS team will contact you within 3 business days.