Tackling Quality of Care Issues Locally/The Oregon Experience

1.5 MEAC CEUs Applied for

January 17, 2019

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Ongoing work on quality improvement is essential to safe, excellent and responsive midwifery care in any setting. Please join Silke Akerson, CPM, LDM, Director of the Oregon Midwifery Council, to learn about the Oregon experience of creating a community-based midwifery Quality Improvement (QI) Program in response to safety concerns. In this session, Silke will cover each strategy used in Oregon for quality improvement and discuss the improvements in outcomes and transport relationships the midwives have seen as a result. Participants will come away understanding the concepts and evolution of quality improvement, the use of QI in midwifery, cultural competency in relation to QI, the benefits of QI, and with concrete tools for addressing quality issues in your own state or community. 

Silke Akerson, CPM, LDM is a mother, home birth midwife and herbalist in Portland, Oregon.  She has been a midwife for 17 years and loves that she never stops learning from her clients and the births she attends.  She has been active in midwifery leadership and advocacy in Oregon since 2010 and is currently the director of the Oregon Midwifery Council.  Quality improvement and continuing education have been the focus of Silke’s work with the Oregon Midwifery Council.  For the past 6 years she has been working on a comprehensive midwifery Quality Improvement Program in Oregon that seeks to ensure excellent care and outcomes for community birth families as well as continued growth for midwives as practitioners.