FACT SHEET
About Childbirth Connection
F
ounded in 1918 as Maternity Center Association, Childbirth Connection became a core program
of the National Partnership for Women & Families in 2014. From its inception to the present,
Childbirth Connection has worked on behalf of women and families to improve the quality of maternity
care.
In the present environment with unprecedented opportunities for creating a high-value health care
system, Childbirth Connection advances effective strategies for maternity care quality improvement,
including innovative delivery systems, value-based payment systems, consumer engagement and
performance measurement.
A pioneering advocate for evidence-based maternity care, Childbirth Connection issued the widely
distributed and well-received 2008 report, Evidence-Based Maternity Care: What It Is and What It
Can Achieve. This report exposed pervasive gaps between best evidence and widespread maternity
care practice, and was crucial in putting maternity care on the national health care quality agenda.
Childbirth Connection works across the continuum of clinical effectiveness resources and activities,
including with systematic reviews, performance measures, decision aids and clinical practice
guidelines.
Childbirth Connection’s pioneering series of national Listening to Mothers surveys illuminate women’s
childbearing experiences and views from before pregnancy through the postpartum period and have
shaped policy, practice, education and research. Maternity care stakeholders value and extensively
use Childbirth Connection’s reports, issue briefs, fact sheets, Facebook and Twitter pages and awardwinning websites for both childbearing women and quality improvement. An updated website for
women launched in 2016 at www.ChildbirthConnection.org.
Childbirth Connection represents maternity care consumers, and health care consumers in general, on
a broad range of advisory bodies and work groups, and partners with organizations and agencies from
diverse stakeholder perspectives to advance high-value maternity and health care.
For more information, contact Carol Sakala, director of Childbirth Connection programs, at csakala@
nationalpartnership.org.
1875 Connecticut Avenue, NW | Suite 650 | Washington, DC 20009 | 202.986.2600 | www.NationalPartnership.org