Carol is an experienced maternity care advocate, educator, researcher, author, and policy analyst. With a continuous focus on meeting the needs and interests of childbearing women and families, she works to
• improve the quality, outcomes, and value of maternity care
• give voice to the needs and interests of childbearing women and families
• advance evidence-based maternity care, woman- and family-centered health policies, and maternity care shared decision making
• help women navigate the maternity care system.
Carol has served on deliberative and advisory bodies of the National Quality Forum, National Committee for Quality Assurance, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Guidelines International Network, and the US Breastfeeding Committee, among others.
Carol creates resources that are widely used to improve maternity care policy, practice, education, and research. She has served as:
• co-investigator of national Listening to Mothers surveys to illuminate experiences and views of childbearing women
• member of the PregnantMe team that is creating state-of-the-science maternity care decision aids
• lead author of the “Milbank Report,” Evidence-Based Maternity Care: What It Is and What It Can Achieve (2008)
• founding author (2003-2007) of the continuing “Current Resources for Evidence-Based Practice” column, which is published jointly in 2 professional journals
• author of the “Letter from North America” column in the journal Birth from 2006 to 2012
• member of founding team and contributor to the Consumer Panel of the Cochrane Collaboration Pregnancy and Childbirth Group
• co-author of the Cochrane review, “Continuous Support for Women During Childbirth”
Carol helps foster, develop, and/or apply high-quality clinical effectiveness tools – including systematic reviews, performance measures, clinical practice guidelines, and decision aids – to help address widely recognized patterns of maternity care overuse, underuse, and practice variation.